Happy New Year! Stepping into a new year feels good. The first inclination for this month’s Newsletter was doing a rundown of 2023, then listing new goals to tackle in the upcoming year but I’m not going to do that because my knee-jerk reaction is to do that ad nauseam every dang day and honestly, it’s exhausting. I will say that letting stuff unfold more organically got easier last year and I’d like to keep improving on that in 2024.

So, instead of a long-winded monologue, here’s what’s been cooking in the studio as we moved from one year into another.

Having a painting move quickly from the easel to the gallery wall is a fairly new mode of working and I like it. In the past, I’d work on a series for months, hiding away the work as it was completed until it was time to show it altogether.

As much as I love seeing a space filled with the exploration of an idea, hanging a work that I still don’t quite fully understand yet is pretty great too. My little fam and I got to experience that with Desert Shadows which was hung at Artspace111’s holiday party not long after I completed it.

ALTARS

I made new talisman critter altars and reworked a few previously used backgrounds. I am absolutely obsessed with making them. The End.

The first proof of Lolly and the Talisman is in, edits have been made, and the second proof has been ordered!

Fun fact: If you laid the illustrations side by side in the same order as they are arranged in the book, they would connect into one panoramic landscape with a continuous dirt trail and a changing sky that gradates from bright morning blue to dark dusk grey.

The newest things to be listed in the Shop are small studies that are usually used as blueprints for larger, future pieces. Making these little dudes and dreaming up their stories connects me to the big Universe stuff.

Documenting my landscape through paintings and storytelling.

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