i love you, and...
Hello out there,
We took Elsa to the beach today and she loved it. She always loves it. The longer we know her the more we understand her preferences: she likes to lay horizontally in the bed and spins this way like a magnet. She likes peanut butter cookies way more than any other human or dog food on earth. And she really likes the beach.
I hope you’re hearing your own preferences too and meeting them whenever possible. What joy, to like particular things, and to do them.
Algorithm Free Art
Art I’ve shared on social media, free from the feed and straight to you
So many of my pieces are love poems. Danielle and I were packing up orders yesterday and enjoying all the “I love you” prints heading out this time of year. I’ve never been a big valentines day person but this year it seems so sweet. Not just for romantic love necessarily, but for all of it.
I think that queer people know best how love is always original. It’s abstract art- we make it beautiful even without a reference for how it’s supposed to be.
I’ve been trying to figure out which of my pieces are about love. But of course they all are:
telling the story of my full body reach toward
learning to love this life
enough to let it come, and then, and
let it go
So here’s to honoring love with limits-
The kind with edges, endings, firewalls.
The kind made up of a choices, good and complicated ones
The kind that is not just affection and need, but also care and then, freedom.
One day, the long and tangled story of reasons to go and reasons to stay loosened. I left because I wanted to. The evidence no longer mattered. There was no one who would see it all and simply rule in my favor. There was just me, and what I knew of myself, and what was in my power to do.
I currently have a interactive essay up in my story on this piece, about how it feels different or the same when we are saying it to someone else compared to when they are saying it to us. If you’d like to have a look it will be up for about 20 more hours.
Easy Does It
clips of my latest writing for our new art-making community
January 2022 Q&A
Question: I noticed the intentional use of the word "mark" for painting/drawing/etc and was wondering what your thought process was behind that.
I love this question! I started using "mark" gradually over time, as I wanted a noun for the thing that I had made other than "art" or "a painting" or "a drawing" since all of those carried some sense of value expectation. When I heard artist Louise Fletcher encourage her students to focus on painting (verb) not making a painting (noun) it clicked even more. When I thought I should paint something, I'd think of the end result, whereas if I thought I'll make some marks it felt easier. I could take the next step without going to the end, like I illustrated in this diagram I shared last week.
You do not have to be good
Perhaps at some point you have, like me, felt your life make sense for the first time under the spell of Mary Oliver's words: You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. / You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.
It happens to also be the best art advice I've ever heard.
I'm here to write to you about the idea of being "good" at art. (I can barely say "good at art" with a straight face so I will probably put it in quotation marks forever).
Begin: the practicalities
My entire art process is set up around lowering the barrier to begin. I am not interested in resolving to make art. The only way this works is to make it easy and pleasant. Here are 11 most practical things that work for me:
Make it a pleasure. Keep a chocolate bar on your sketchbook.
I keep all my art supplies where I am the most. It's always been tempting to the clean out a corner or a room somewhere that feels like "mine" and to set up a dedicated art space. Even when I've had the option to do this, I keep all my go-to supplies in the living room, between the kitchen and the TV. They are within arm's reach of the couch and the table. I see them all the time. I can always collect up my supplies and take them to a private oasis if I have the time. But if they are where I am, they can become part of the life I already have.