I started a tiny sketchbook on Friday since I often carry a pretty tiny purse. I'd like to do more sketching my daily life. I've been using the Handbook watercolor books, but this was my first not w/c paper since they got bought out by Strathmore. The paper quality is definitely down, but I liked my first sketch once I added more paint. It bled through a little with the pen work, but not too much. The second sketch I did with a felt tip instead of a fountain pen, and I I had no bleed through. For this tiny size I might try one of the softcover Stillman and Birn, but for my bigger sketchbooks I still like the hardback nature of the Handbook watercolor, and I love having the pocket in the back.

Because the sketchbook was in my purse this morning, I did a second quick forest sketch, the one with the Pigma Graphic 1 felt tip, and it was fun to pause for not too long on my forest walk and do a quick sketch. Hopefully this will get me back in the habit.

On Friday I met my sketching friend Libby at Dixon for Food Truck Friday My favorite food truck Flipside Asia was there, so I made a point of getting to it. I did the superfast sketch of the small girl statue as a warm up and then moved to. my bigger book. Of course I liked the fast, looser sketch of the girl herself better, but I ended up liking the conservatory and the deep shadows of the full page version too. I started both with a fountain pen using KawekoParadise Blue ink, which is my favorite funky color lately. It's water soluble and melts into the paint, which is fun and loose. Then I went and got meatballs in an Indian marsala sauce to eat in the gardens with Libby. A lovely day.

Memphis is leaning into monsoon season this year, with a generous side of tornadic activity. We're supposed to be getting about 12" of rain over four days this week, but after Wednesday's tornadoes and Thursdays downpours, Friday dawned sunny. I took the opportunity for a day out and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I went to Crosstown first to run through the drug store and also get a chocolate croissant from my favorite bakery, and then I headed to Dixon.

After sitting the garden for a while enjoying the tulips I headed inside to the Floyd Newsum exhibition. It's so much fun to sketch these huge blocks of color with patterns woven in. They feel architectural and show up well across the room. I had done one sketch early in the show and have been wanting to get back, but the fatigue has been real this last month. I was glad to feel good today and get the chance to sketch in the show again. I used Neocolor watercolor crayons and Derwent Inktense pencils since watercolors are forbidden in the gallery. My bench was also in a deep shadow, so the green got a little more intense than I meant it to (when I'm mixing paint I tend to take the edge off with some blending, but with preset colors you get what you get). Overall though I'm happy with the sketch and had so much fun doing it. Aside from the colors, I love Newsum's use of his own personal vocabulary of motifs. Ladders, spoons, chickens, dogs, and, beautifully, his grandmother, recur often. The show makes me want to think more clearly about the symbols that are personal to me.

I worked through my normal lunch time, and I wanted to check the new books at Novel, so I treated myself to crab cakes on the patio of their bistro. It was hopping indoors, but I had the patio to myself on a chancy weather day. I hadn't eaten there in ages and enjoyed the crab cakes, and I also had fun sketching out across the parking lot to the crepe myrtle trees. It started sprinkling and then raining with a little more intent as I was getting close to finished (you can see splatter marks in the blue ink) so I called it finished and packed up quickly.

I finished the day by printing the first batch of my snow tree print while listening to a day baseball game, and I played my banjo and caught up my journal in the evening. An exceptionally good day.

Dixon plants thousands of tulip bulbs each year, and they are all bursting forth right now. A huge section of Memphis turns out to take family photos and roam around. It's kind of a fun show, especially on a Saturday, if you're interested in people more than in unobstructed views of the flowers. I settled on a bench and watched the flow of people and sketched the ones who stayed still long enough. I wasn't particularly happy with the way I did the blossoms, but I felt like this captured the bustle and color of the overall scene.

With snow/ice in the forecast, I gave myself an outing before it hit. It's been a busy few weeks, and I hadn't been to Dixon lately. I've seen several lovely paintings by artists I follow of interiors at museums, and it made me want to go sketch in my own favorite museum. I couldn't have chosen a better day. Almost no one was there -- I think everyone must have been out buying bread and milk instead. So I settled in the floor and did an overall gallery sketch after I walked through the two new shows. There are two modern shows now, both of which are unusual and really fun. This retrospective of Floyd Newsom is wonderful for sketching -- huge, bright, colorful pieces. I love how he's chosen his own vocabulary of symbolic items to work with, much like Dine or Thiebaud or the Dutch still life painters, going back a bit. I'll enjoy going several times and looking at more details.

The other thing I loved was a piece from just last year done while he was in the hospital. Like several of his other works, it's a larger piece stitched together from individual sheets of paper. It was a manageable size to be working on in his last illness, and it reminded me of Manet's last flowers done in his sickbed or Matisse in his wheelchair cutting out collage shapes for others to place for him. I have always hoped to be making art right through till the end, and it's lovely to see another artist who managed that so beautifully. 

It was a great day out, to recenter myself in a space so dear to me. I'm hoping to get there more often this spring. A weekly pop in would be good for both my spirit and my creativity.

I've been having fun sketching Christmas this year. One scene I had spotted on the way to the farm and been dying to do is Bartlett Wines & Spirits, above, with Santa and his reindeer on the roof. I was hoping I hadn't missed it with my stomach bug, so I raced out on Boxing Day and sketched from my car (cold but partly sunny). I had a ball. It's mostly Inktense pencils with watercolor on top.

A couple of days later I met friends at Dixon to see the exhibitions and do a little sketching. More Inktense, which I'm kind of on a roll with, plus neocolor crayons since you can't use paint in the museum.

We moved into the cafe for a while, and I switched back to ink and paint. I love this Kaweko Paradise Blue I found this summer, but I was frustrated with the overall sketch. Overworking it wasn't going to help, though, so I switched to a few fast people studies. I had fun doing tiny family sketches for my dad's present, and I think I might like to do some more illustrated memoir projects this year, so practice live is always good.

I've been doing so much show stuff lately that it was lovely yesterday to take a whole day for sketching and friends and art. Memphis Urban Sketchers met at Dixon yesterday, one of my very favorite places. It's been crazy cold this past week, but it was warmer today and very sunny. I found if I sat in the sun, it felt great to sketch and drink in the outdoors a while. I did the top sketch, a little labored but fun, chatting with one friend. Then I went inside to warm up as the sun shifted and had a great conversation on illustration with another friend in the cafe. I drew two more friends, and the paradise blue ink ran unflatteringly into their faces (which I should have left white given the ink I was using), but I loved the half done bookshelves behind the scene.

I had about fifteen minutes left to draw in one of the galleries, so it's wonkier than I would like (and I can't get the lovely muted teal color in pencil), and I added the left bit outside after we were breaking up but still chatting.

After THAT a few of us went back to midtown and ate takeout Golden India outside on the patio in the sunshine (I'm still reveling in all that time outdoors after some indoor days), and finally I sketched Henry on his favorite chair just before bed. I was totally going yesterday, and it felt great to just flat out draw. None of them are fantastic, but it all felt so good just to do.

I've been a lot at home lately working slowly on the last couple of Rowan Oak prints and fighting a bit more long Covid fatigue. But this week I got out a couple of lovely times and hopefully am on the upswing again. Sunday Christina and I went sketching in the neighborhood, an old Masonic temple building that now houses a restaurant. The weather has been perfect, so that night I took myself out for a patio dinner of fish tacos and sweet potato fries with Henry and my book and sketchbook. My friend Chrissie says to always get the pink drink -- just have a celebration. So I did.

Then today after doing some errands with my Dad I still had energy to go see the new shows at Dixon. They're great. As I was heading to leave it started raining, and then it just poured. It was gorgeous, and there was a handy bench on the covered porch, so I settled in to draw and wait it out. I'm grateful to my friend Elizabeth, who started the Memphis Urban Sketchers, for training me to carry a sketchbook. I sometimes get caught without one, but I'm almost always glad when I have it along.

I went to a fantastic Coastal Landscapes show yesterday at the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham. I’ve always loved the arts and crafts era of western landscapes, and this was a great mix of California painters with some up the coast to Washington from the turn of the last century into today. I was delighted to see so many women represented. The first piece is by Mary DeNeale Morgan. It was my absolute favorite for light, tree shapes, color, and brushwork, and I hope to see more of her work in the future. Many of the paintings had super glossy varnish, and it was tricky to get photos without glare, so forgive funny angles and bits of glare.

A block away, right next to my favorite second hand bookstore with an enormous art department (Henderson’s) is a neat little letterpress/stationery store. Jude found a super nifty Kaweko mechanical pencil with a thick tower of graphite, fully retractable, instead of a skinny little lead. I love sketching in pencil but also hate having to remember a sharpener. I was delighted and headed back to the museum for further sketching while he took a longer lunch break and waited for me to surface again. A kind guard offered me a stool, since the benches are never next to the paintings I truly want to sketch.

That was all the sketching I had the time and energy for, but two other favorites from the show were this exquisite woodblock print by Elizabeth Colbourne from 1933 and the large landscape by Euphemia Fortune (VERY bad glare, but the best name ever! She was in a recent Dixon show of American Impressionists). If I were home I would be going back with colored pencils and sketching weekly in this show. It’s delightful.

The talk at Dixon was amazing. I was honored and thrilled that 70 fantastic people showed up, midweek at lunchtime, to hear me talk about my creative life and influences. I make art on my own in my house most of the time, so getting to go out in public and share the things I love and things I've learned was exciting and greatly fun. I had another hour's worth of conversations on my way out, and I loved hearing people's own experiences or what book or artist they might want to look into after hearing my favorites.

After working hard to put that together and spending the entire next day doing checkup and regular screening tests, I was ready for a couple of slow days. Henry and I took walks, went to the farmers market, had second tea, and spent a lot of time quilting or mending on the sofa and watching some British tv. It was lovely. I'm grateful for the pace of my life that lets me push when I have deadlines but also take time off afterwards. Here are a few sketches I did just to get back into art for pure enjoyment.

The top one is neocolor crayon with watercolor, and the bottom tested two new samples of De Atramentis document ink (waterproof and silky) and the four leaf clover in my classic Diamine water soluble ink that moves and melds with my watercolors. The watersoluble comes in a nice range of colors, but it stays really firm and almost harsh when I paint -- kind of like making your own coloring book. I'll try some more sketches with it, but I think I still love the soluble ink best. I've had fun with the crayons too, and I like the added texture, but I miss line in that top one. It's good to branch out and experiment but sometimes it ends up reinforcing your already favorite things.

My museum lecture at Dixon Gallery and Gardens is today, and I'll be talking about my art heroes and all the things I've learned along the way about making an art centered life. They're between exhibits, so they didn't need me to tie into any particular show, as I did when I talked about the history of plein air painting to go with their Barbizon exhibition some years ago. So I'm going to be self indulgent and talk about all my favorite artists and what I've learned from them in a slight gallop through art history.

I'm also going to talk about taking the time to do small projects for yourself, just because you want to. This was one of mine a couple of summers ago -- a series of tiny prints (I think they're 3x5") of my most formative artists. Constable, of COURSE, on the top left, for painting outdoors and non stop and in his own home places.  Walter Anderson underneath him for pretty much all the same reasons plus printmaking. Georgia O'Keeffe for charting her own path and claiming the right to live where and how her muse dictated. And Berthe Morisot for just GOING for it, in an age where women didn't much. And also making her own career against the advice of older, established male artists who leaned heavily on her not to exhibit with those ragtag Impressionists. She was remarkable.

The project fizzled there, and I hadn't even gotten a finished print of Constable until this week, but that also is good. Things you do because you want to but don't have to finish if you don't. The Anderson print made it into my show at WAMA, but the others were just because they sounded like fun.