I took myself on a museum trip last week that I'd been trying to work in all spring and summer. I finally made it the last week of Kristine Potter's show Dark Waters. Good to have a deadline. I spent two days in Bentonville and two days on up the road in Kansas City, since I was that close already. The Momentary in Bentonville was the primary destination for this photography exhibition based on murder ballads. I had seen a single image in Oxford American last year and immediately ordered her book, but I wanted to see it on the walls, and I'm SO glad I made that effort. It was a remarkable installation. A cafe table set up with a video screen of an open mic ballad singing greeted you as you walked in, and the murder ballads themselves followed you through the exhibition. I'm usually not a fan of video installations in museums, but this was exactly right.

A luthier (guitar builder) was, perfectly, one of the museum guards for the show, and we had a great conversation the second day I was there sketching. He said a lot, really a lot, of people just didn't get the show at all. But I was raised on murder ballads and play clawhammer banjo, and it was a perfect fit. A glorious display of Southern Gothic but with an incredibly timely (sadly always true) commentary on the danger of being a woman in a world of men. With the Olympic runner just murdered by her boyfriend (set on fire) and the Avingnon woman raped by 80 men while her husband drugged her for their and his pleasure and invited them in to do violence, this show about the dangers of trusting men is all too current. One old time singer I heard do a concert said what she has learned from ballads is never to go down to the river with anyone named Willie.

There was deep and great beauty amid the menace though, as there is everywhere. Anyway, I loved the show and visited it two mornings in a row to sketch. After lunch both days I went to Crystal Bridges and toured their collection, and then I walked home. I loved being able to park my car for the two days and walk everywhere. Such pleasure. It felt a little like Paris again -- walking, looking at art, sketching, and walking some more. I think and digest art while I'm walking, and I see things I want to draw.

The first evening I celebrated all the art I saw by sketching the wonky old tree out the window at sunset. I had a lovely bank of windows with a small breakfast table that was perfect for perching and sketching and tea. What more could I want really?

Here are some images from Dark Waters, photos first, and then a short video to give you a sense of the ballads playing behind. I can't say enough how powerful the exhibition is, and I hope it gets another showing I can visit down the line.

It took me getting to Washington to get to a scanner and clean up my St. Louis sketches. I love to draw there and did some smaller, faster sketches as well as full watercolors. This first one is walnut ink with a dip pen of an Osage Orange tree. They always grow in such fascinating shapes.

I also got a fantastic blueberry/lemon curd crepe from a food truck creperie that flashed me back to Paris. I loved both the food and the fun little bus, so I did a sketch to remember.

There was also a great book signing at the graphic bookstore Betty’s Books. Beautifully they got in an art hero of mine Lucy Knisley. I found her first graphic memoir An Age of License some years ago, and it (plus my first Ben Hatke book found at the same time) made me want to include more storytelling in my work, which had been purely landscape up until that point. She had a huge influence on my work, and I trace a direct line back from her book to doing several of my own, even if they’re quite different in feel. It was fantastic to hear her talk, meet her in person, and see her delightful hand painted cat dress.

One more lovely day in town was revisiting the St. Louis Art Museum, another favorite place. They had a Vuillard I don’t remember from before on view this time, which makes sense because it’s on cardboard and probably needs to rest for preservation purposes in between times out in the light. I love his patterned interiors and interlocking shapes and had fun doing a sketch while standing in front of it.

I've been working my way back into my longtime printmaking project of trees at Rowan Oak this week, but I gave myself a holiday for Leap Day yesterday. Thursdays have long been special to me, and it was not only Leap Day but also the 4x4 anniversary of Muddy's Bake Shop, my favorite bakery for both the treats and the warmth and welcome when you walk in the door. They opened 16 years ago on Leap Day and made Memphis instantly a better place.

I also dropped by a couple of thrift stores with a carload of donations, and I ended up coming home with two new-to-me cashmere sweaters for a total of $13.50. A big win. And I feel lighter in my house at the same time.

After lunch I treated myself to a trip to Dixon. I saw their current show of married artists Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown a few weeks ago, and I can't stop thinking about it. Especially Wonner's portraits. I went and sketched in the semi dark with only dry media, so these are both too saturated and not at all worthy of the paintings that inspired them. But I loved spending the time looking that deeply at paintings I admire from an artist I hadn't known before this show. He was in California with Thiebaud and Diebenkorn, and I can see that throughline. His painted lines have multiple colors making them up, just as Thiebaud's do. One of my longtime favorite artists. I plan to go back and sketch more while the show is still there.

Well, it's been a crazy start to the year. I had a cold after New Year's and was low energy for a week, then I went down to Ocean Springs for a few days, just to get out because it had been ages, and now Memphis has been snowed in since Sunday. Nuts. I'm so glad I got down to the coast and spent a couple of days fully outdoors before the crazy freeze got here. It was tempting to stay down there, but I figured my 100 year old house needed shepherding through single digit cold.

I've been using the time as an at-home writers retreat and starting a new book. It's been great to have an exciting new project to keep me company, and I got so distracted I forgot to post all of these Ocean Springs sketches. The first morning I made tea and walked down to the beach with a thermos and my sketching things and tried to paint the sunrise. It moves so quickly that I never capture what I hope to, but it was lovely to sit out and try.

Next I decided to drive out to Gautier. I'd never seen Oldfields, the family home of Sissy Grinstead Anderson. She and Walter lived with her parents and the two oldest kids for a few years after his round of serious mental struggles. He did gorgeous work there. The house had fallen into disrepair and is being stabilized and restored by Mississippi Heritage, thankfully. It has a truly glorious live oak tree in the side yard and a view of Horn Island. I was shocked to see a suburb had sprung up around it, but I guess that's not surprising with its bluff view. I sketched the tree (of course!) and a corner of the lovely house.

And while I was on a pilgrimage kick, Mattie Codling the curator at WAMA, suggested I visit the Evergreen Cemetery where the Anderson family is buried. It's a gorgeous old cemetery overlooking the bayou, begun in the middle 1800's, and the family section is lovely with modest flat stones that have matching trees carved into all the Anderson ones, with Sissy (Agnes) having a star instead. She certainly earned it. She raised four children largely on her own and tended to Anderson's legacy after his early death from cancer. Remarkable woman.

It's powerful to visit and sketch the graves of people you admire. I got to sketch Vincent and Theo's graves a few years ago, and I was glad to spend some time here as well. A live oak tree up the hill and keeping watch felt perfect for this artistic, nature loving family.

Last weekend a car plowed off the road and straight into the side of the Brooks Museum of Art. Sadly as well as hitting the building, it wreaked devastation on two of the three statues that Wheeler Williams had been commission to sculpt in 1961 out of Carrara marble. Like so many Memphians, I love those statues and had been by just a few weeks earlier to sketch them. I went back this weekend to sketch what remains, one lonely statue of Fall, missing her seasonal sisters, and two chipped and cracked bases. The statues have been taken to see if they can be restored, but I'm heartbroken to lose these dazzling white statues from their niches against the white marble jewel box of a museum.

The only small consolation is that the museum was planning to abscond with them, removing them from the perfect place they were created to be, and take them downtown to try to catch more tourist foot traffic. We would be missing them soon enough anyway. But I hate destruction and continue to grieve for them in the park.

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.

I took my first trip since November last week, back to one of my very favorite places. I spent time in the museum, at the water, at Shearwater pottery, and just sitting and enjoying the breeze playing my banjo. It was deeply good.

One fantastic thing I got to do was go sketch in Anderson's cottage again. With my show last year, I've made friends with the museum staff (and enough with the family that they trust me too), so I can borrow the key and sit in the quiet of that space with extra murals and just sketch. It's a huge honor. Above is part of a half finished mural around the window in Anderson's bathroom, facing the wall of cows above his bathtub. It's faint. These colors are more robust than what's there, but I wanted it to be legible as a sketch.

Anderson couldn't always get permission to do murals. Earlier in his life he was living with his inlaws at Oldfields (the current show is all about that house and the work he made there). His father-in-law was emphatic that no painting on the walls was going to happen, so Anderson used large pieces of paper to make "murals." The piece below is one of those, and I was completely charmed. I sat and sketched it in the museum.

This is the second view I did of the cottage. You can see a smaller mural of two birds. I also loved all the shelves with small treasures, bits of driftwood and shells and stones. I have some of all of this in my own window sills at in bowls at my house, as did Georgia O'Keeffe in her New Mexico home. It reminds me of the "nature collection" my sister and I made with my grandmother growing up, but seeing these artists carry that habit throughout their lives makes me feel a deep kinship with both of them.

It's the last week for the lovely American paintings show at Dixon, and the director Kevin Sharp was giving a lecture yesterday as well, so I treated myself to another museum day. I'm getting out less than I used to with my separation anxiety dog (as well as a natural tendency to stay home a lot anyway), but I'm finding that when I do get good opportunities, I make them count more. Instead of saying, maybe I'll go to Dixon tomorrow or next week, if a friend wants to take Henry to the office for today, I jump right on that chance to do something really worthwhile. So Henry got to be an office dog yesterday, and I got a museum day.

I had one more painting I really wanted to sketch, this William Trost Richards painting of Maine. Once again, it's a bit darker and more vivid (especially in the water) than the original since I was working in low light with limited media. But overall I'm pleased, and it will also just help me remember better.

Then I had lunch outside (I'm still masking indoors) and started the tulip sketch but rushed back in to hear Kevin talk about the artist Walt Kuhn. I also worked a little bit on this Inness copy, toning it down some. It's not right, but I'm happier with it than I was. And I finished off the day sitting outside and finishing the tulip sketch at the top. I hadn't used my green ink lately, and the spring greens have had me itching to get it back out.

I keep going back to sketch in the Dixon show of American paintings. I think (hope) it has one more week for me to get back and sketch a little more. It's frustrating in some ways. You have to use dry media in the gallery (European museums are much more forward thinking about copying with paint), so I can't mix colors and gray things down a bit as I would like to. Dry colors (pencils, watercolor crayons, etc.) tend to be a bit more candy colored overall, so these colors are off a good bit, most especially on the lovely, subtle Inness. He's one of my favorites. But it's still deeply profitable as an artist to spend time looking at a painting deeply enough to sketch it even if the sketch is never what I hope it would be.

The colors were reasonably right for the Sloan, though (above). Sloan mostly painted cityscapes and was instrumental in the Ashcan school. I was drawn to this landscape, a summer holiday with his wife, precisely because he brought that fuller bodied intensity to a pastoral landscape. His colors are almost shocking side by side with the oranges and greens and a deeper blue green sea than I managed to convey here. It's an arresting piece, and I love the brushwork in it as well.

 I put Henry in daycare today and did a twofer on local museums. I needed one really quiet day after getting in my final draft for the graphic essay, but then I was wanting to get out and see some great art, and we have wonderful shows up in Memphis right now.

The first was Harmonia Rosales at Brooks. Her show plays off of a lot of "Old Master" paintings and reimagines them to include heroines and mythologies rooted in West Africa. It is magic. I love painters with a strong sense of art history, and her cracking open those tropes to make room for the rest of the world is infectious and beautiful. She uses the gold of the Medieval icons and pairs it with the exuberant abundance of the Baroque, and she has a strong series of visual motifs that are meaningful and personal to her as a painter. It's a remarkable show.

I ran to the grocery and home for a sit down/have tea kind of lunch, and a bit after I went to Dixon. I love their show of American paintings. I've been three times now and have more pieces I want to go sketch, but today I worked from a huge landscape by Thomas Hill. I used watercolor crayons and inktense pencils since it's only dry media in the local museums. (I added paint to the Rosales copy when I got home while it was fresh -- I wanted that real golden feel to it.). That's limiting on colors and especially on skies, but it's so instructive to look at a painting long enough to replicate it and figure out how the artist made certain effects work.

The rain was holding off, and my favorite statue Ceres was surrounded by yellow daffodils and red tulips, so I did one more quick sketch before leaving. I love the graphic essay project, and it's wonderful to have someone want to publish you, but it's also fun to go make art purely for the joy of it on a day off. A perfect break.