My show is fully up, signs and everything, my reception is this Friday (Nov. 18th, 5-6:30 at Playhouse on the Square in Memphis), so I went dancing to celebrate. And to restore a little equilibrium after the week that was difficult for me and so many of my friends. It was marvelous to spend a weekend with sisters and other special people and to get my joy on dancing. Usually dance weekends are the only time I completely walk away from art and don't even sketch, but I did do just a couple at Noodle in Decatur, Georgia, while having lunch with our crew. The laughing Buddha above was too delightful to ignore, and I also loved the warm lamps dancing above the table tops. Plus it's nice to have those good memories woven into my art journal.

It's election day, and I walked around the corner to vote. I saw neighbors, I bought iced brownies at the bake sale that's always there (which means I never vote early unless I'm gong to be out of town), and now I'm going to get back to making art.

I'm trying another narrative self portrait like the one in Paris against the window of stars. This feels a bit like my Edward Hopper series -- woman alone in a large world.

This piece is based on a sign in the Old Forest where I walk daily. I've loved it for a couple of years. It seems to ask me regularly whether I will or won't step courageously out into the world and open myself up and take risks. I've done that again this fall, with not wonderful results so far, so I'm trying to remind myself to stay open. On the upside, this art is also a staying open to something new, and I'm excited about trying a new direction. So perhaps the results are mixed. And closed off is not how I want to live permanently (though I needed to be there for a while to heal last year), so I keep walking past and thinking about this sign.

I sketched it a few weeks ago and again more recently.

Then Peter Ceren posted this photo of it shining in a patch of sunlight, and I knew I had to go ahead and paint it for real. You can see more of his stunning photos of the forest we both walk daily in on his public facebook page The Old Forest.

First I typeset a couple of letterpress signs for my house, using the pointing hands I got in Paris last year. Sometimes it's good for me to have reminders in my work space. I printed the same image on the gessoed paper I'm using for this painting. I can paint over them if I decide I want to, but at the moment I'm liking the idea of combining letterpress with paint and also having a little bit more oddity and symbolism in this piece. I've been looking at Odilon Redon again and won't go as far out as he did, but the symbolism and surrealism are really appealing to me at the moment. I like that it's subtle but also there. I'll see if I keep feeling that way as I get further into the painting.

Oddly, when I sat down to sketch my teacup this morning (below), I had completely forgotten the sketch I did yesterday at Cafe Eclectic. I took Mr. Darcy over for a spontaneous brunch, and we scored an outdoor table even on a Sunday morning. I was flipping back through my sketchbook with a flock of little girls on Saturday as I sketched at a fundraiser and realized that it's been going a while (six weeks in Paris slowed down the progression, since I always use a dedicated one for trips), and there are some cumulatively hard places in this one. There has been a lot of good art and friend time since I got home from Paris but also some tough places, and I'm quite glad for the chance to turn a fresh page and start a new book. It's nice that art offers me this opportunity, and the timing of end this book is helpful.

So this morning I did a new sketch in a new book of the teacup I got at the street flea market down south in Paris. I'd been meaning to sketch it and hadn't yet. I also got the spoon, which says "Amsterdam" at the Marche d'Aligre, my favorite brocante. And the cup perfectly fits a saucer I had made by my friend Melissa, so I feel surrounded by good memories as I drink my tea. Now I'm off to the forest with my new sketchbook.

I sketched the Hanrahan bridge from the Arkansas side for the Memphis Daily News this week. The new pedestrian crossing is a great addition to Memphis (though the trains come by so close to you that I don't think I can take my usual four-legged walking buddy, since he's still nervous around even skateboards). They're working on trails on the Arkansas side so people can extend their walks and bike rides a bit as well.

Above is the watercolor I did for the paper. I took a photo of it halfway through, with just the fountain pen line work and sky. If I'd been doing it for myself, I think I would have stopped there. I tried again, quickly, in my journal once I was done, but I think I got the sky too dark for it to balance well. I've been enjoying drawing with a fountain pen again, though. I'd kind of forgotten to for a while and have fallen in love with it again this fall.

I just hung Celestial Paris, my show at Playhouse on the Square through the end of the year. It's a whole passel of my on site watercolors I did in Paris, plus oils on paper and a handful of carved prints based on them. Whitney Jo always gives me the huge wall because she knows I'll get obsessive and fill it up. Six weeks' worth of beautiful weather in Paris certainly helped that. I hung in groupings of different areas around the city, and sky studies were an ongoing theme of the summer.

Here are the block prints I did. I meant to do more but got distracted by the oils instead, for the first time in a long time. Skies are just fun in oil, though.

And here is my set of sky studies with Montparnasse. I was playing with the idea of 25 Views of Montparnasse, loosely following Hokusai's Mt. Fiji project, showing the tower from different angles and distances. There are also plenty from my apartment window with the solid form acting as a nice foil for all the different stunning skies I saw.

There is a small set of Amsterdam watercolors I haven't gotten on the wall yet (with the reception still a couple of weeks away and no play going on at the moment, I've allowed myself a "soft opening" at the end of a very busy month), but those will also be up in the next few days. The reception will be Friday, November 18, 5-6:30 pm.

It's been a busy week. My Celestial Paris show is now on the walls at Playhouse on the Square (up through Jan.1, and the reception is Friday, November 18 from 5-6:30). Then I went dancing with my sisters to celebrate and blow off steam. So I'm behind posting a bunch of sketches I've done in the last week or so. Here's a whole collection, starting with the Old Forest, of course.

The pedestrian section of the Hanrahan Bridge over the Mississippi River just opened. It's a great thing for Memphis, and everyone in town, I think, went down to check it out. I waited till Monday, to let the opening crowds thin out, and then I took a break from show prep. It's about a mile total, over the Arkansas side and out into their flood plain just a bit.

Here are the bridges (there are three together) from Arkansas. A quick line drawing.

And a stop at a downtown coffee shop after.

Tuesday I had an artist do at the new Halloran Center at the Orpheum. I tend to sketch as I listen, whether that's music or meetings.

Wednesday I took a lunch break adventure over to Arkansas again, right near Dacus Lake.

And met an amazing tree there. I'm going to have to go back and paint it more thoroughly. I can see it in a print.

I've got a busy couple of days coming up with seminary and newspaper projects plus a little bit of social life, and then I should be back to making more art.

I did several oil paintings for my exhibition at Dixon last year (at their urging, since the space was large and needed a few big paintings), but I went straight back to prints afterwards. They have been what I'm really excited about the last eight years or so. This past summer, though, I decided that I really missed the way I used to paint skies. I have struggled to do clouds to my satisfaction in watercolor, so around about June, I declared it my summer of skies. By happenstance, I ended up staying in that magnificent apartment in Paris with a two story window and a huge sky view (unlike my house in Memphis, which is surrounded by trees that have great beauty but also largely block my view of the sky). So I ended up watching the sky a tremendous amount over the summer and painting from windows both front (above) and back (below). Somewhere in that process, I felt an internal pull toward oil paint again, and I did several studies toward the end of the trip specifically thinking of a painting to follow.

For several years as I was starting out, my watercolors were much more line drawings with a splash of color. They didn't have the depth or richness to give me enough information to use them as sources for oil paintings, and I mentally wrote off that use for them. But I have been painting with more layers and richer pigment the last couple of years. I am delighted to have suddenly realized that both my full watercolors and many of my sketch book sketches are now strong enough to let me do paintings from them. Sometimes I write something off in my mind, and then it takes me a while to question that closed door and reassess the situation. Armed with that new perspective, I've been going back through a couple of other Paris journals to see if there are other sketches I might want to paint from. It's been a bit of a balance for me to spend more time in recent years with a sketchbook instead of making "exhibitionable" work. The sketches have pushed me into doing prints I wouldn't otherwise have thought of doing, but if I can also do oils from some of the sketches, that doubles the appeal and helps me feel less self indulgent spending time with my sketch journal instead of doing stand alone watercolors.

Here is a quick oil I started late in the afternoon. I didn't really have time, but I was on a roll and excited, so I ended up diving in. This was a sketch I did at bedtime one night in Paris. I was ready for bed and closing my curtains when I glanced out and saw this view. I had to run downstairs for my paints and sketch it before I went to bed. That place was just magic for me. You can see the sketchbook below sitting on the easel in the background, along with my self portrait watercolor I've also been painting from. I took photos along the way with this one so you could see my progress.

I just about finished the self portrait one yesterday as well. It's a different kind of piece for me, and I really enjoyed branching out into something a little more narrative.

Facebook art sites have this fun thing going the last several years called #inktober. The idea is to do and post an ink drawing daily or weekly or whatever you can manage. At the moment I am out of sketching mode (which I was in all summer while I traveled) and now frantically making paintings and prints from those sketches for my upcoming exhibition, so this isn't particularly well timed for me. But I did take myself to the theater on Saturday night to see Charles III, and given the state of the parking in Overton Square these days, I wanted to get there early to not walk blocks on my own after the play. So I had time to sketch the lovely moon I saw rising over what's now Circuit. It's good to live where you are a recognized eccentric instead of a cause for alarm. I was squatting under and against a street light to sketch when one lovely woman came up and asked if I were Martha Kelly and said she'd just ordered a couple of my calendars. Lovely!

I do fewer black and white sketches overall, so I'm largely doing inktober with foutain pen sketches as a base for watercolor instead of my more normal pencil, but it seems to be a fairly loose prompt for drawing, so that's always good.

I've been having a really, really lovely art weekend. Sometimes things just click and flow, and it's life passages like those that make me really happy to be an artist. Often you get bogged down in book keeping, packaging, arranging shows, promoting shows, creating calendars (big on my list lately), or even just work that is fine but having to be ground through a little bit. These moments where everything seems to be coming together are magic.

I'm continuing to proof the fountain block (my previous blog post), and it's almost done, and I'm really pleased with it, after a decent bit of anxiety during the carving stage. Then I spent some time beginning this oil on paper from a watercolor self portrait I did of myself in the Paris apartment this summer. That place was magical, and I spent so much time there sitting in this window, painting and watching the sky. I cemented old friendships and created new friendships in this space. I tried experiments and branched out in my art (this self portrait being one of those experiments). It was a transforming trip for me, though I am continuing to wait and see which of those blossoms continues to bring fruit for me. But yesterday I dove into one of those promising places and started this oil. I haven't painted figures in oil since college, and it felt good and right. I'm enjoying the possibility of further narrative in my work, and this feels like a powerful expression of my summer sojourn where I sat with the sky and listened to my heart. I'll keep working on this (there are stars to come), but it felt like a really good day's work yesterday, and I am so grateful to have this means of expression and way of making sense of my world.