Hello friends,
Last night I made the biggest pot of miso soup, so now we’ll be eating it for days. I’ve been thinking a lot about sensory comfort and taking more and more freedom in doing what feels good - I’ve been painting more, wearing noise cancelling headphones anywhere I like, wearing softer and bigger clothes, and eating warm things. I like the sense of ritual that fall brings to seek out the cozy and bright. I hope you’ve found something that feels good lately, too.
The new series is under way. I’m calling it At home, even in this world as that’s all I can think about lately. I have so many questions about how to balance openness and safety, honesty and privacy. Still, it’s what I want: to feel like the pine trees, who know the ground is there to hold them, so they stand there, expanding, and flexing in the wind.
If all goes well, the series will be available in early November. Wish me luck.
I’ve got some new art and writing for you below, including this month’s new patreon print. Also, I quietly launched some new tiers last month and forgot to tell you! In response to requests for a way to collect prints from over the years, I made a “best of” print tier (and a +sticker option). On those you’ll get one of my favorite, previously released prints at the patreon discount ($5 off each print and free shipping anywhere in the world, plus the other perks). If you’d like to see how it works you can check it all out here.
Before I go, a hello from Miyoko who throws her head back and naps whenever she feels like it.
warmly,
Brit
ps. I’m looking for a book agent. I am doing this by clicking around on the internet and emailing strangers. If you or a friend are a non-fiction agent who would be interested in working with me, please reach out.
Algorithm Free Art
Art, free from the feed and straight to you
I started to understand how bad everything is when I was a teenager — individual experiences stringing together in patterns to reveal the sickening systems and histories that pervade it all. I learned the word ‘problematic' and saw it in my salad, my friends, the sunny day at the wrong time of year. Every pleasure became a guilty one.
I learned quickly that purity politics was a trap, but it didn’t matter because I had become very afraid of anything bad that paraded itself around as good.
I never wanted to fall for that again.
So for a long time there was not much joy. There was privacy, withdrawal, hot takes, despair.
In the last couple of years though, things have shifted. The everything hasn’t gotten better, but somehow I am learning to love this life.
Recently, the poet Andrea Gibson said, ‘I hate it here’ writes every other person on Twitter, but I love it here. I love it here, and I started crying immediately because I felt that way too. I don’t know when it happened, when I stopped hating it here, but it happened.
This piece, along with this text, is going out just to my October patrons. If you’d like one, join us on a new art tier! More here.
Easy Does It
clips of my latest writing for our art-making community
“Inspiration is an ecosystem, a complex living thing. When we nurture it we can live in an inspiration-rich space, rather than waiting on it to come every now and then like a shooting star.” - excerpt from my recent series on cultivating inspiration. Read more here.
“A way that I tend to my ecosystem is through sketchbooking - making marks, collecting my ideas and trying out lots of and lots of things. There's space, and need, for all kinds of pages. Diversity makes the inspiration strong and resilient. I try to plant every idea that comes to me, even if it's brief - a phrase, some colors, whatever. Experimental things that I'm doing for the first time come in like seeds, and retrying and continuing ideas nurture what is already growing.” read more
ps. In what is turning out to be the absolute longest sale of all time, the goodbye-to-the-old-britchida-shop sale is still running as we’re not done with the new site yet. (!!)
We’ll be narrowing our print stock down for the new website, so this is the last chance to shop the full catalog and current originals.
Use code GOODCHANGE20 for 20% off all prints and GOODCHANGE10 for 10% off all originals at britchida.com