Day Four of my museum trip was back in the Nelson Atkins. I went through the remarkable Hokusai exhibition, which included his teachers, peers, and modern artists influenced by him as well as reams of his own work. It was stunning. I drank it in without sketching, moving back and forth and revisiting favorites before I exited.

The museum cafe was much more crowded on a Saturday, so I bought a drink and another excellent scone to supplement the apple I had brought and took it out to a front patio shaded by cherry trees. I love the shuttlecock sculptures and took some lunch break drawing time before diving back in. I revisited favorites this last day. The stunning, dark Caravaggio of John the Baptist had been calling me since I arrived, so I took the time to settle on a handy bench and sketch it. Later I was wandering through the Egyptian section and drawn by this life sized relief from Nimrud. I sketched one of the museum goers with it. I had meant to include more, but people were so kind about not blocking my view that I really didn't get the chance. The black stone sculpture of Horace also enchanted me. I could spend a week in this museum without sketching everything I want to. I've made a commitment to myself to do more art trips within a day's drive of Memphis. It's so renewing for me to take time to sit with great art. I've been missing my European trips through covid, and I hope to get back sooner rather than later, but I should absolutely take advantage of the things closer to home as well.

It was an early closing day at 5pm, and the light and evening were lovely. I sat out on the lawn and drew the shuttlecocks with more of the museum facade. I was tired, and it wasn't very good, but it felt nice to respond to all the art I'd seen by doing a little more sketching before driving home the next morning. What a treat of a trip. I met some lovely people that I wouldn't have talked to if I'd had a companion with me. People in groups are their own small bubbles moving through space. When you're alone, and often when I'm sketching, people feel much more comfortable having a conversation, and I had a great couple of conversations that started with my asking a museum guard a question as well. It's an unhurried, wide open way to walk into the world. I love trips I take with various friends and family, but I always love a solo trip too. Such a luxury to do exactly what is calling my name in any given moment.

Friday morning I got up early and drove the three hours from Bentonville to Kansas City. The Nelson Atkins is a spectacular museum, and I'd been wanting to get back the last couple of years. It feels like one of those grand European museums with a spectacular collection housed in a palace built expressly for art. Kansas City was lucky enough to get two enormous bequests, and the trustees agreed to work together, right as the rest of the world was selling off art to try to survive the Great Depression. I had no idea such a museum existed within a day's drive of me until I stumbled into it a few years ago on an unrelated road trip. Magnificent is not too grand a word to describe it. It's the kind of place that feeds my soul.

It also happens to be nestled in a lovely parkway system in an old neighborhood that reminds me of Memphis. I found a place to stay where again I could park the car and just navigate by foot around the area, my favorite way to travel. I spent a lot of the day moving slowly through the collection, but I had

I went back to the Momentary for Kristine Potter's Dark Waters show the second morning in Bentonville. I really just wanted to sit and absorb it. Sketches from photos are never going to be fantastic, but looking at something in a detailed enough way to draw it helps me see it and remember it better. The most successful sketch is the one of The Balladeer where I backed up and got the setting as well, with those shadows slanting along the wall beside him. It was fun to do. I also did a sketch of the pair of photos of Naomi Wise's two gravestones (she was "Omi Wise" in the ballad). Amazing that you can visit that spot centuries later.

I had a whole plan to eat lunch at a fancy pizza food truck halfway along the walk up to Crystal Bridges, but they weren't open, sadly, during their posted hours. So I ended up with a wrap from a market and an outdoor table, which wasn't bad. There's a TON of construction everywhere in Bentonville, and you do get the feeling that the corporations behind the town are pushing development big time, but they are including a bike trail up the middle of town, lots of mountain bike trails, and lots of pedestrian amenities, which make it a pleasant town to be on foot.

In the same spirit as sketching the photos, I did a sketch of the Mark Rothko at Crystal Bridges. I couldn't get the colors just right in the pencils I had (they want you to sketch in pencil instead of paint), but I've enjoyed sketching him in the past as well. There are such subtle edges and textures and overlaps that it's easy to skim over unless I really slow down. Truthfully I might have sketched the gorgeous Hopper skyline across water, but there was nowhere to sit, and it's a crazy busy museum. One of their best features is lots of truly comfortable benches and even sofas, and there was a sofa in front of the Rothko, so that won out.

After revisiting all my favorites from the day before to spend more time, I toured the Frank Lloyd Wright house that's been moved to the property. It's a small family home, so I'm not sure it's really typical of his work, but it was fun to see one in person. I loved the huge high windows of the main room, but he seemed intent on making an extra large contrast with that space and had dark, low, heavy ceilings and very narrow passages everywhere else. The rest of the downstairs (upstairs is off limits with too delicate a staircase for all the traffic) felt like a below decks in a boat. It's not a house I would want to live in, but it was fun to see. It was a gorgeous day that I had spent largely indoors, so I sat out along the forested art trail after and sketched the house from a bench below it. Such a lovely day.

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.

This summer has not gone to plan, to say the least. I sprained my ankle on vacation just as I was getting back to daily walks after another bout of fatigue. Above is the sketch I did waiting on a tire to replace the one that was separating on the way home, somewhere in the middle of Missouri. That was the amuse bouche for the main course to come. Getting home that night, August 1, already two hours late, Henry and I were jumped by literally hundreds of fleas. It's been a five week odyssey of figuring out how and where they were swarming up from the crawl space. I've flushed at least a thousand down the toilet, scraping them off my legs every time I set foot in the kitchen and the back room where we do most of our living.

We were out of the house another three weeks or so at neighborhood airbnbs, and camping out in the front of it another couple. Yesterday we sat together on our couch for the first time, and today Henry is on the couch just behind me as I work on the computer, which has been also mostly off limits. For the first time this morning, after five house and crawl-space treatments of various kinds and two long stair riser caulking sessions by me over the weekend, I did not have a single flea jump on me. Hallelujah. I cannot even express how good that feels.

The book M is for Memphis got derailed for a while, as did (clearly) this blog. Sadly Weebly's mobile app has also gone hinky and doesn't post the right photos when it publishes, so I just shelved this and waited until I could get back to my work space and then (YAY!!!) upload my proofs of the book an hour ago. Now I can catch up on my other work and post things here again. Thank you for your patience if you're a regular reader.

Below is Friday night's dinner sketch at Ecco. Henry and I walked up and met our regular sketching/art/lunch buddy Christina. It was a perfect patio evening and a lovely break at the home stretch of all the craziness.

Saturday was the Memphis Urban Sketchers meeting at Palladio Garden, which has a lovely large patio for sketching. It was good to get out, remember my dip pen and fun new ink bottles, and do something messy for me instead of careful for the book. I also used the group as a perfectly timed focus group. I printed out several possible book covers and passed them around and got great feedback from fellow artists. I'll do a book post next, but here's my bridge from August to present day. I think I'll go for a walk today with my sketchbook to celebrate and maybe just treat myself to lunch out at the same time.

I got to go out on a sailboat in the San Juan islands, sailing out for the day from Anacortes. It was lovely to be out in an ever changing landscape with lots of tiny islands shape shifting around us as we moved past them. Perfect for sketching, though at times the wind made it less than easy. I did several sketches but also just enjoyed the day out with family.

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 had SUCH a good time staying at this tiny cabin right by a small river. I sketched and read and sketched some more. It was perfect. Here's the second half of the sketches from my two night retreat.

I've given myself two small vacations/exhales in the past month instead of the longer trip I had hoped to be taking by now. I've mostly been nose to the grindstone on the Rowan Oak show that hangs this month, but I did take two smaller trips recently to relax and exhale. The first trip was to a cabin just outside Mountain View on the site of the Herpel P.O., right along a small bayou with large stones sitting right down by the water. I sat out there with my sketchbook, journal, and book. I had every meal sitting by the water and watching the birds. And I walked up the quiet road with my sketchbook to visit more wonderful trees. It was heaven. This is the first batch of those sketches. I was there two nights and part of a third day, and I sketched a lot after doing so much print work and missing my sketchbook.

I looked back at my Eclipse sketches this week while I was working on a print from them, and this page looked a little bare. I also wanted to keep a souvenir of the cool Eclipse glasses we all got, so I ended up doing a small scrapbook page to go with the sketch. I love the idea of collage, but I’m terrible at it. My attempts always look like a 4th grade art project gone wrong. But sometimes I want to preserve a special bit or piece from a day out or a trip.

Since I was in that mode, I also added my “number being served” ticket to my County Clerk’s office sketch. The number I pulled at 8:03 when the office had opened at 8….

I’m a bit more prone to do this kind of thing when I travel and pick up ticket stubs or other cool souvenirs. did a couple at my WAMA show to celebrate both a gorgeous bunch of tulips from a friend and also some King cake.

This last one is my favorite, but that might be mostly because of the King cake, which was delicious.