Laurelines

Wales: Journeys and connections

There are places in my life that I have experienced as numinous, locales in which the c'hi, or life force, is palpable to me, almost visible, almost overwhelming. Much of my art life has been an attempt to express that energy.

In recent years, I discovered that some of these charged places, far flung now, were once connected, the result of a prehistoric mountain- building event called the Caledonian Orogeny. I learned that Norway, one of my best-loved lands, is tied to Scotland, where I lived and where my daughter Kate was born, to parts of Wales, to the Appalachian mountains, close to where I live now... and that they formed a mountain chain high as the Himalayas. This was hundreds of millions of years ago, of course, when there was no Atlantic Ocean to separate them. I fell hard for the idea of a force that connected, and still connects, these places of my life.

Early spring of 2016, pursuing my renewed interest in geology and having learned of the Caledonian Orogeny, I read  Richard Fortey's The Hidden Landscape and it was then I heard a call to Wales, where I had never been.

 Here is Fortey's siren song to me:

Many years ago I travelled to Haverfordwest to get to the past. From Paddington Station a Great Western Locomotive took me on a journey westwards from London further and further back into geological time, from the age of the mammals to the age of the trilobites.The train soon quit the flat Thames Valley beyond Reading, and with it the soft sands and hard cobbles of the Reading Beds, laid down when there were mammals and birds on land and crabs in the sea, and when the world would have felt familiar. Then I was speeding over the Chalk, and back in time to the company of dinosaurs. The train travelled on towards Bath, where Jurassic limestones and shales take turns across the countryside, the former proud with ancient corals, the latter dark and low, with ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, 'sea lizards' that grasped Jurassic fish and ammonites. ... Under the River Severn and into Wales and I was back before the time of the dinosaurs, to a time when Wales steamed and sweated, not with the fires of smelting, but with the humid heat of moss-laden and boggy forests in coal-swamps, where dragonflies the size of hawks flitted in the mist; and then on back further still in time, so far back that life had not yet slithered or crawled upon the land from its aqueous nursery.

At last I arrived in Haverfordwest --- I had come back far enough for the rocks to yield trilobites. Trilobite land lay all around; to the west as far as St Davids, imbued with the mystery of the origin of all things.

p 1, The Hidden Landscape.

Fortey continues:

It was further to the west, near St Davids, that I began to appreciate more the links between the rocks beneath and the land above, and between our own lives and distant prehistory. St Davids is a little town set at the western tip of South Wales, and it is not much bigger now than it was two hundred years ago... . But to see the rocks themselves you must go to the sea. The cliffs near St Davids are now famous. The entire cliff path is owned by the National Trust, and it winds up and down all around the old county of Pembrokeshire... .  And everywhere there is rock. Rock plunges vertically into the sea where the breakers chew at spiky slabs two hundred feet below. In other places there are folds; the bedding is twisted, and convoluted, and thrown into crazy spasms as if the strata had been in the hands of a demented pasta spinner. Then, suddenly, along a vertical crack the rocks will change: black shale will give way to purple sandstone, or silver slate to red shale. These cracks are just what they seem... breaks in the fabric of the earth... . Hardly any of the rocks here seem to be horizontal, as they were when they were laid down beneath the sea. On these cliffs, the viewer can feel the strength of the Caledonian convulsions twisting and breaking the rocks, conjoining what was once separate in time and space, separating what was once joined.

p 7, 8, The Hidden Landscape.

  

Richard Fortey's magnificent voice and story took me to Wales, to Pembrokeshire, to the countryside around St Davids, to Whitesands Bay, last October and for two weeks this month.  I knew where I needed to be and what I neeed to do,  to draw those folds and convulsions, and so I did, on three days, standing on the sand, surrounded by tide sounds and bird songs and wind.

First day, on the beach, midway through one of the drawings:

The nearly completed sketchbook on the table of the apartment I rented in St Davids:

 A sample section of the book:

 A slightly wobbly video of the book along its length:

Whitesands Bay, Pembrokeshire accordion sketchbook from Laura Frankstone on Vimeo.

I want so many more years of this! I want to go back for long stretches and make more of these responses that mean the world (you should pardon the pun) to me.

Well, we do what we can. I'm returning to Wales this fall, but to Anglesey and the Lleyn Peninsula this time. Anglesey plays a part in our Caledonian story, too. I will get another pass at this unfolding epic tale that I love.

 

More conventional travel sketches from my second week in St Davids will follow in a few days.

2017, the plan(s) and hopes for a newish year

I'm late posting my new year plans because I've been waylaid by flu for a good first ten days of the year.

 Waylaid times can be useful for thinking and such was the case for me. I started keeping a daily journal again. My writing had become sporadic and sparse in the busy, extroverted year that 2016 was. There were also world events that eclipsed my inner life, at least the act of thinking and writing about it. 

World events loom huge today, but I separate from them by taking to the studio, to the outdoors, and to the balm of friendship. And on this page, here, with you.

Painting!

On the studio score, I'm very excited! All that pent-up painting energy, accumulated over the months of travel in the fall and winter, is coming out in leaps and pirouettes! My Places Project gave me so many opportunities to experiment and store up ideas and inspiration. In 2017, I'll be able to see what emerges from that in the form of more sustained pieces, paintings and such.

I was afraid that my trip to Wales might eclipse the ideas that occurred to me during my Alaskan residency, but no!! The Wales imagery and ideas seem to be patiently waiting in the queue for Alaska to happen first. I have several paintings started and a sketchbook bursting with color, texture, and compositional studies, but I resist the urge to share those here. Let us not queer the deal by showing too much, too soon. But the textures and the colors are giving me ecstasies of delight!

 

Drawing!

Oh, and I've been drawing, too. Drawing is central to my life. As I've said before, drawing is one of my earliest memories, and one of the happiest, of my often-challenging childhood. Here are two simple pencil drawings I made last week of our Jonas lost in Legoland!

Pop ups in my sketchbook!

I don't know exactly where the impulse came from, but I started making pop-up sketches in my sketchbook a few days ago and now I'm in love with that idea! Here are a couple of recent examples. The pop up approach seemed especially right for expressing that mental image I've had since October of jackdaws wheeling in the dawn sky at St.David's Head. Not that this one perfectly captures that image, but it's a start!

I wanted to learn more about this technique, so I bought two books on the subject and quickly learned I had been doing it all wrong! ;D. That didn't bother me a bit. I can carry on my way, but still add traditional techniques to my repertoire. Here are some early attempts at learning popups the normal way. Who knows where this will take me? I have no weighty plans or expectations. Pure play is what this is. But there WILL be more to come!

Illustration!

I'm going to carry on working for Charleston Style and Design. I love working with the AD and the editors there. It's a quarterly, so the timing perfectly suits my resolve to keep work for others at a minimum. There is ONE other job that I've been approached about and I'm very happy about it, but the when is uncertain. This year, for sure. Or, for maybe. I'll let you know more when I can.

My latest illustration accompanies an essay by Katherine Wilson on her mother's lifelong obsession with Italian style and notions of beauty. I am sharing a just a few of the many  draft sketches I made to show how, at my searching hand, Sophia Loren looked like Zsa Zsa Gabor, Gina Lollobrigida, and other anonymous retro beauties, until I got the style I wanted and a good enough likeness. 

Travel!

Because I found Wales deeply inspiring, I knew I had to get back and see where  those geology-based images would take me. So I have made arrangements to go back to Pembrokeshire for two weeks in May! And maybe in fall, too. We shall see. I long to go back to Norway and that will be my next big travel goal.

As long as I draw breath and can stride, I'll be on the move. Who knows what the future holds? And that last question, dear friends, will be last allusion I make here to the events of the world for a while.

Happy and safe 2017 to one and all! Thank you for your support and interest.

A story of Alaska

 

A story of Alaska, in three essays and two epilogues.

 

Essay one, my art residency application:

 

Back to Alaska: My Story

...

Through the unknown, unremembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

 

Lines above and below from T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Four Quartets.’

 

I was born on Adak, an island in the middle of the Bering Sea, in a blizzard, at home. Wrapped in an army blanket, placed in a cardboard box, I was taken by jeep to the hospital.

When my mother died five years ago, I was seized by the idea of heading back to my birthplace. I had not been there since I was a baby. It was time to return.

Research reminded me what my father could have if he were still alive: Adak is often besieged by high winds, fogs, cyclones, and snow.  Flight delays of days or even weeks are common. Facilities for travelers are now practically non-existent, after the government’s relinquishment of the military base where my family had lived. My dream trip seemed outside the realm of possibility.

Still, even though I have painted in Iceland, a similarly rugged landscape, I could not give up the idea of going back to an Alaska in some way related to my Aleutian island. When I found the Chulitna Lodge art residency online, I began to think this might really be possible. Adak is several hundred miles from Port Alsworth, but there is a real geological connection: the mountains in the Lake Clark National Park are part of the Aleutian Range and all of this area, of course, was once one landmass stretching across the Bering Sea. 

A passion for energy and place, as well as a delight in the materiality of paint, pencils, ink, and surfaces, have been the propelling forces of my art life. At Chulitna Lodge, I would be able to experience these in a deeper way than I have ever done before.

With the model of British artists like Richard Long in mind, I could document my stay there using wilderness materials: mud as paint, pigments I would make from local rocks and other natural materials, twigs as drawing tools, bark as canvas, lake and glacier water as the basis for watercolor washes, and more. I would mix these with more standard painting and drawing materials, exponentially increasing my expressive repertoire. I would make drawings, sketches, studies for larger paintings, monoprints, mixed media pieces.

The possibilities seem various and thrilling.  Not only would my work be a metaphor for the c’hi emanating from the Alaskan wilderness, it would literally embody it, containing as it would the DNA of the wild place where I was born.  

 

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

 

Essay two, statement of intent:

In order to fully immerse myself in the Alaskan landscape, and to express in my artwork the energy that pervades it, I intend to make art with natural, found materials... mud, rocks, twigs and bark, among others.  I will draw in the sand and document that process with photos. I will draw and paint on any available appropriate surface.

I will combine local organic materials with a limited number of conventional art supplies that I will bring with me, so that I can fully express the life force I find in that milieu. I will make studies for later paintings. I will make sketches and on-site mixed media finished work.

I am going to spend the next months developing the practice of using found organic materials for art making, something I haven’t done before. At the same time, I want to be sure to bring a sense of spontaneity and discovery to my week there, so I will guard against forming a lot of preconceived ideas of exactly what I will produce.

A week is short, but I am used to traveling and orienting myself quickly to the spirit of a place, and documenting it with drawings, paintings, and sketches. In a week I will be able to work hard, experience deeply, and build up a store of images, both in the artifacts I create there and in my heart and my mind’s eye… a store of images that I can turn to as an artist once I return to North Carolina.

It will have taken me a long time to get back to an Alaska related to the island where I was born. I'm not going to lose it.

 

Essay three, artist statement:

I’m a restless artist, a shape shifter, a seeker, and therefore, not surprisingly, a traveler.

The past three years I’ve done a lot of illustration work, work for other people. It was a good thing to do, a necessary part of my trajectory, I’m convinced. I’ve also spent a long time drawing and making sketches, work that is an immediate and direct response to place and people. That, too, was worthwhile and right.  Now I’m determined to get back to my own paintings, my own deeper path, to plunge back into that thrilling process of trying to know what it is I need to say and how in the world I’m going to say it.

I know I need more of mountains, rugged open spaces, cold days and nights, and skies with lots of stars...the numinous places of my history and my imagination. With my trips to Iceland, Norway, the Alps, I have been circling back to the source. That is where I need to be.

Not long ago, on reading Michael Pollan’s wonderful book A Place of My Own , I was reminded of the concept of ‘c’hi:’

' "C’hi" is the Chinese word for the earth spirit, or cosmic breath, which flows in invisible currents over the face of the earth... . This earth spirit animates all living things.'

It’s when I pick up my brushes and address the c’hi, that life force I sense so strongly, in places that are personally important, that I am a painter in a way that matters most to me.

Epilogue one:

180 people from around the world applied this year for this residency program, which is available only in the summer months.  Applicants were told they would be notified of results around the first week of January. The large number of applicants made for a long delay in the selection process.

On Easter morning, I got an email in my inbox. Out of 180 applicants, 8 were chosen. I was one.

Reader, I’m going!

 

Epilogue two:

Because I didn't hear from the residency program for a long time, I assumed I hadn't made the cut, so I made another plan to spend time this year making art directly connected to a numinous place. I wanted a place somehow related to coastal Norway, but closer and easier for me to access. I chose coastal Wales and I'm going there, too! And that is a story for another day! 

February in the studio: collecting, dreaming

I've been collecting images this month, fossil images relating to the places I've been to and hope to go to. This is an offshoot of my desire to make artwork with and of the numinous places of my life. I plan to paint and draw with found organic materials, as I've mentioned before. I won't be using fossils themselves, I hasten to say, but will incorporate that imagery somehow into my work, if and however it works out.

I've also been generating lots of images for illustration projects, one of which I finished, but can't share until it is published in April. But I CAN and do keep the leftover bits and pieces and recycle them in the pages of my  journal.

First, though, the drawing below. It's throwback to an old, old theme of mine from my early years of blogging, in which I collected interesting objects found on my walks, brought them home and drew and painted them. As usual, it was the textures and gestures of the objects that captured me.

I have birds! My most recent illustration assignment for Charleston Style & Design centered around singing birds in a cherry tree. I put my cd, A Field Guide to Eastern Bird Songs, on the laptop and played it as I drew. Perfect inspiration!

Here are some of the aforementioned illustration leftovers, pasted on a page in my journal:

Below, more leftovers, from two different projects, appearing together in the pages of my journal.  A happy pairing, I thought:

Below, a spread of the fossil studies I mentioned earlier:

There is something very compelling to me about connecting in my artwork, in any way I can, to the deep energy of the world we stand on. It's that old sweet song... channeling the ch'i.

In a few days, I'll be back in the San Francisco to see my daughter and my dearest friend Kathleen. I'll be sketching there, you can count on it. 

I'll tell you then about the place I've recently added to my plans this year, a country connected to Norway by virtue of the events of the Caledonian Orogeny. What's four million years' separation between friends? I'm beside myself with glee, thinking of the new place!

See you soon!

Moving along: October

October has been a month of transitions. I moved past one big set of deadlines, slowed down a bit and made some really fun Inktober meanders. (Inktober means making an ink drawing for every day in October. I didn't make the daily goals, but I made several drawings throughout the month.)

Then I approached another deadline, did that work, and finally, here I am, ready for travel and trying out new materials and methods for painting and drawing. Will tell more about that later, but for now I'll just say that I'm really, really excited about these new directions for 2016!

And here are some of the Inktober forays. I learned to my delight that I can draw on my interior landscapes of the far north, of Iceland and Norway, and with a few strokes of ink and wash and resist, bring those numinous places to myself again!  It felt like magic!

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In a move of great counter-intuitiveness, I am going to a hot and dry place next week, to stay with an old friend and visit others. I'm so looking forward to the friends, but the heat... not so much.

December will find me running truer to form.  I'll be going to the Bavarian Alps, circling back to a well-loved place of my childhood.

I'll be back with sketches of that hot, dry place soon!

Around the World Blog Hop: My Turn

I want to thank my friend and fabulous artist Kris Wiltse of Whidbey Island, Washington for passing the Around the World Blog baton to me.  If you don't know her exquisite, multi-facted body of work, please check it out. You will be so happy you did.

Here's how this works.  A blogger answers four questions and then invites another blogger to answer the questions on their own blogs the following Monday.

Here are my questions and answers.

What am I working on?

 I'm in the beginning, exploratory stages of paintings with mountain imagery as a point of departure. I've written about this recently so I won't repeat myself too much, I hope. 

I have on paper, on board, and in my memory, images of mountains in Italy:

Mountains in Norway:

Mountains in Iceland:

 

I'm not sure how the new mountain pieces will go and what they want to be. We will find out in time. Of course, I have to go and see more mountains! I am a passionate traveler, always looking to get back to the Source. (Most any excuse will do ;D.)

Why do I create what I do?

The real subject of my work, and my reason for making it, is my deep response to the energy I feel everywhere around me. Call it the ch'i, the life force, the vibrations that, according to string theory, are the pulse and generator of the universe.

It is present in the landscape and it is present in and through human beings and other creatures:

 I foresee for this year at some point and as a complement to my mountain paintings, a return to my first love in art, the human figure. Somehow, some way. I'm seeing, with my mind's eye, loose portrait-ish pieces made by drawing with paint, incorporating some cut and torn paper and some pattern elements.  My recent illustration work using pattern and cut paper has fueled my imagination. 

How does my work differ from others in my genre?

I work in several ways, with different approaches, purposes, and different media. Maybe my  pronounced mutability is a key difference, though the other artists I most admire are seekers like me and their work is always evolving and varied, too. 

How does my creating process work?

I keep a deeply personal, introspective sketchbook journal in which I record ideas, images, as well as observations and facts. It is the wellspring for my work as well as a record of its progress. The work I care about emerges from this dialogue with my deep self.

In terms of the physical making of my imagery, I feel more and more as if I'm becoming a kind of human divining rod. I approach a subject or idea with an open and inquisitive heart and I wait to feel the energy that I know is there. That process, when I'm lucky, gives me a gestalt, a sense of the basic gesture and forms involved. Looking at the examples I've included here, you will agree with me that they are nothing if not gestural!

The materiality of my work gives me so much pleasure, too. Really, on some level, I paint and draw just so I can immerse myself in paint and ink and graphite, crayons and paper and gessobord.

I have asked my brilliant and multi-talented friend Beth Adams of Montreal, Canada to follow me in this blog hop. Beth is a publisher, writer, editor, graphic designer, painter, and printmaker. Her blog The Cassandra Pages is worth a long, long visit.  

From an island in Washington state to a college town in Piedmont North Carolina to the major city of Québec...we're hopping!

 

 

 

2015, the gift

It's early Sunday morning as I write this. The delicious, protracted hiatus of holidays and my January birthday is about to end and, oh, it's been a heavenly two weeks! I have loved (mostly) every second of it... the quiet (mostly), dark, pulling-in time of the year is my time.

For the first time in two years, I haven't had the sword of Damocles in the form of a big show hanging over my head as I start the year... and no small deadlines for now, either.   Just my beautiful new Paolo de Faveri Alpine wall calendar hanging in my studio to inspire me and one more day to get that studio ready for painting paintings.

This new year is a gift and I want to make sure I use it well and wisely. 

And it's clear to me that using it well will be to be mostly inner-directed in my work.

 I am full of excitement and very unformed ideas about how to respond to the places I have fallen in love with recently... the Scandinavian world, the alpine world. Oh, those Italian Dolomites that I loved for themselves but also for how they brought back the best of my childhood memories of time spent in the Swiss/French alps! There is a deep, pervasive energy in that northern world, a primal source for my life, that sets me vibrating like a divining rod.

Part of this inner direction will be... to let go and see where my heart takes me. When I was making paintings for my Iceland-inspired show year before last, I had as my mantra the Icelandic line, Hvert liggur thessi vegur?  Where, then, does this path lead? 

I had little idea of what sort of work would come out of my passion for Iceland and Norway and I accepted and ran with that unknowing.

Last year about this time, I wrote the post Cutting Up and Letting Go.   (In my ten years of blogging, I've made a habit each year of posting my intentions for the coming year.)  There I made the case for again running with the unknowing, for following my inner sign posts.  But it didn't quite happen. I had lots of deadlines and obligations.

In that post from last year, too, I talked about how much I love the materiality of my work, the textures, the shapes, the colors that can, if I do it right, appear on my paper and my gesso board.  They have a life of their own. It's my job to open my arms and catch them.

In addition to painting, I'll, of course, be drawing and sketching. Drawing has been a major part of who I am since I was 3 years old, if not before. 

So this year. Feeling more humble and grateful for the gift of another year, less breezy and complacent, I'm ready to run down that path, not knowing where it leads, but knowing I have to go there.

May 2015 take you where you want and need to go.

2014 in the rear-view mirror

If 2014 were a road trip, I'd be dizzy from the speed and velocity of it! Whoosh!

For the second year in a row, I've had a significant show of my work in the fall to work toward. In 2013, it was my Iceland-inspired paintings at the Horace Williams House. This past fall, it was work on a floral theme at the Ackland Museum Store, UNC-Chapel Hill. They were two very different shows, the 2013 one featured all paintings, the 2014 show included ink and wash and mixed media on paper pieces, among others.  And the pieces were too big to be scanned and I didn't have time to take good photos of them... whoosh!

 

Having deadlines is a powerful motivation, but I learned from these two shows not to say yes to another show unless I have over half the pieces already finished when I agree to show! (Yikes! and pass the ibuprofen!) Still, the show went really well and I loved working with my fellow exhibitor and friend Ippy Patterson and my buddies at the Ackland Museum Store.

2014 brought more illustration work for me, including images for Walter Magazine, Charleston Style & Design and Chapel Hill Magazine. Other clients this year were The Nature Conservancy and Edible Hudson Valley.

Fireflies for Charleston Style & Design.

Person Street illustrations for Walter Magazine.

Blue crabs for Edible Hudson Valley.

Continuing on the art front... my work appeared in an excellent new book on drawing by Katherine Tyrrell of Making a Mark blog fame.  Her book Drawing 365 is now available here in the US and will be released in the UK and worldwide in January. This is a book you will want to own if you have any interest in drawing. It's hands down one of the most informative and useful of this popular genre.  Here's a small peek at one of my contributions to it... a blind contour drawing, demonstrating one of the 365 drawing tips Katherine writes about:

I travelled a lot in 2014, but since this is already sounding like one of those annoying Christmas letters, I'll mention only the trip that relates directly to my art career, my October trip to Italy. I had the great fortune to have been invited to Rimini, Italy for a conference organized by the Italian tourism industry, one designed to connect people whose passion is travel with people whose business is travel, to see what kind of synergy might result. My years of travel writing and sketching on my blog led to my being chosen to participate in this exciting new conference, now in its second year.

It was exciting, fascinating, informative and fun. I learned so much about the travel industry and about the power of social media and about what it is I do as a blogger and why I do it. I met many lovely people from all over the world.

I will be forever grateful for the organizers of TBDI 2014 for having given me this opportunity.

While in Italy, I fell in love with the Dolomites

and they, along with my passion for the mountains of Norway and the rugged topography of Iceland, have filled me with ideas for new paintings... some kind of response, I know not yet what, to this mountain splendor and energy. More about this in my 2015: A Plan, to be published in the next couple of days.

Finally, on December 20th, I led a sketching session at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. This was a kind of reaching out and giving back as an artist that I have done very little of,  but I so enjoyed that I am eager to do more, more, more!  I had a fabulous group of sketchers, almost all beginners, and they reported having benefited a lot from my talk and our working together. It was such fun and very rewarding!

So, I think that covers it... though I can't be sure, dizzy as I still am from all the 2014 action! 

I have many thoughts about what is to come and will share those, as I said, in the next few days.

Happy 2015 to you, dear readers. I hope 2014 has been kind to you. Thank you for sharing this journey, many of you, year after year. I am so very grateful for your interest and support.

Norway 2013 sketches, resumed!

My scanner seems, for now, to be working again, so I've decided to postpone the 2014 Plan post so I can, at last, share these! We are turning back to Norway, where I was this time last month.

There is something so profoundly calming about the northern Norway coastal landscape in winter. It is the opposite, in my mind, at least, of Icelandic landscape, which teems and pulses with energy.

 

The café in Ersfjordbotn was the one warm and open place we found during our stay in that small fishing village near Tromsø. We walked through the snow to this cozy place every day and ate things we should not have.  They were delicious ;D.

Lanterns and candles are used everywhere and all day in Norway, in a valiant effort to illuminate the dark December days. I loved this cozy café corner, with its candlesticks, lantern, strings of lights.

 The Oslo Opera House is rightfully noted for its stunning architecture. An equally stunning sculpture, all crystalline and icy-looking, seems to float in the fjord behind the Opera House. 

And here is one last look at the rugged mountains and valleys of northern Norway, drawn quick, quick, quick as our ship made its stately progression ever northward.

Next up: the Plan! It's still January, it's definitely still 2014. All is well!

Happy 2013! It was!

 

Not to whine, for such is life... but simply to observe: 2013 was the first good year around here since 2007. Oh, there've been many good days, minutes, hours, some weeks, even, since 2007... but whole years? Not those. Neutral years, years in which nothing much bad happened? Not those, either.

2013 could have turned out differently. The stakes were high. And the big results weren't in until September. 

But what the first nine months were leading up to culminated in very happy news!

My daughter's adorable baby son Miles, born on September 13, and shown here on Christmas Day, at almost 3 1/2 months: 

 I am beyond besotted! Look at that tender, adorable face!

The painting show I started working on in early January, opened in late September to a very warm reception.  There were moments in March when I thought I wasn't going to make it. But I worked through the problems and ended up finding, as I had struggled to find, my own idiom. I made quirky paintings and they pleased me. The fact that others liked them was delicious.

I made illustrations, you will perhaps remember, for a wonderful new magazine about Raleigh, NC, called, appropriately enough Walter!

I got to do all sorts of things---maps, portraits, foodie things, even the cover of the first anniversary issue! And I had a double spread of garden imagery in June !

 

 

 

  

 

 My work appeared on other pages, too. In the June issue of Watercolor Artist Magazine and in Playing with Sketches (the fourth book my work is included in!) by Whitney Sherman, director of the graduate program in illustration at the Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art. I'm so proud to be represented in both publications.

I made trips to Austin and to Portland, OR, to see my darling peripatetic daughter Cecelia. In Portland, I had a delightful sketching meetup with some Portland Urban Sketchers.

As you may know, I ended up my year with an exciting trip to northern Norway. More sketches from that trip to appear in a few days. My scanner is still hiccupping and the holidays are still intervening! 

I will also talk about my art goals for 2014. I've done this before ;D. See you in just a few days!

And happy New Year to all of you, wherever you are!