Puny

I have unreasonable expectations, constructed on scaffolding I can hardly climb, and from up there I sometimes get vertigo. When I sit down to do art, I feel them creeping up : that I’m not doing more, or better work. That it’s not good enough. It’s so lame, this inner voice. So useless, yet there [...]

Dig in and read.

It is midwinter here in my small corner of the world and also in my blue-roomed heart. I’m tucked in, my pulse moving slowly and full of trepidation like water running under pale knocked together shards of ice. Self doubt circles like a pack of coyotes, their tracks mushy and dark where the earth collapses, [...]

Leap

I sat down tonight to paint the way Bean does–with color first, then the image taking shape. I had no plan, no illustration in the back of my head, just the commitment to take a small corner of time out of my day to do art this month. It feels good to keep returning to [...]

My secret inner superhero

The other night I was talking to a friend. He said, “I don’t know, I guess I still feel like somewhere inside me is an inner superhero.” I’m right there with him. I still have that feeling: like one morning I’ll wake up and miraculously be able to live full throttle—without the shredded edges of [...]

Vermillion

Across the snow, the cardinals dart, the vermillion hearts of winter. The wind pulls the mercury down below zero, and the air bites bare skin. Water is glassy under ice in the chicken coop in the morning, and the sun, when it shines is followed by a sun dog, the sky frosted but blue.