Springtime in the Studio.

The air feels lighter, the sunlight brighter, and the paintings are starting to look like places I'd like to be. 

Current playlist:

The Fear - Ben Howard

Take up Your Spade - Sara Watkins

You and Me - Sara Watkins

The Age of Worry - John Mayer

Pine Away - Martin Sexton

Ophelia - The Lumineers

Promise - Ben Howard

Brothers - Penny and Sparrow

Let's Be Thankful.

{An ongoing series in which I remind myself of many good things, and that gratitude is indeed a choice worth making.} 

So, friends, let's be thankful:

 Cherry blossoms that aren't certainly on our side of the property line, but aren't certainly on the neighbors' side either.

Warmer days, and afternoon light in the living room.

A weekend in the mountains at Sharptop Cove with these dear friends (and being the token blonde).

Fireplaces that remind you you're in the mountains with dear friends.

FORSYTHIA & CHERRY BLOSSOMS & MAGNOLIA LEAVES, because these things swell and calm and ignite and please my soul.

 Time in the studio, and reminders of just how fortunate I am to do this as a job.

A night with family (human and canine) on the patio, no jackets needed, dinner on the grill.

Breckenridge & Denver

{Because grown-ups need spring break, too.}

We're young, like to ski, love each other and adventures, and needed no other reason than those to plan a ski trip over a long weekend to Breckenridge, CO. 

Two hotels, liters upon liters of water, four sets of matching purple ski pants, several PB&B sandwiches, a few elk burgers, a whole lot of sore muscles, and one torn ACL later (bless you, Gaines), we completed our grown up spring break with full and happy hearts.

Six girls, one Dodge Durango, and a whole lot of Jason Derulo.

Who doesn't love a room with a view?

Indeed, Narnia.

Not pictured: One minute later when I gracefully ate it and vowed to henceforth avoid moguls for the rest of my days.

Snow and twinkling lampposts are a recipe for something magical.

My dear friend Jessica drove over from Golden for a few hours. Getting to play and ride with her on God's playground (as she accurately referred to the mountain) was good for my soul.

Just some kids who love to ski with our gender-identifying pigtail braids (because honestly it can be hard to tell sometimes under all those puffy clothes...)

Here's to traveling light, making the fun times happen, and seeking out the beautiful things.

Let's be Thankful.

I'm a sporadic poster (see: my entire blogging history). But after going down the charming rabbit hole all night and morning that is Today's Letters (talk about #goals, amiright?), I'm enthusiastically hopping back on the blog-train, like a freshly-inspired idiot who makes sweeping statements with no actual plans. But a girl can dream.

Without further ado, things I'm thankful for lately: 

This sunset from Mt. Sassafras that has stuck in my mind since the January evening it occurred.

Patty Griffin + Sara Watkins + Anais Mitchell = the kind of magnificence that takes a while to process.

The beach condo that was once a particularly dusty shade of mauve (SMH), painted! Suddenly this place is quite inviting. 

  

The sounds and colors of a cold ocean in February.

And this. Because cookie cakes and birthdays are cause for great celebration.

Toxicodendron radicans v. Parthenocissus quinquefolia

 

I was barely coordinated enough to drag a rake across the grass when my dad introduced me to the chore of yard work. The backyard in Princeton Corners was packed with pine trees, and every couple weeks my sisters and I faced the dreaded task of "picking up sticks." We always protested - we faked sick, feigned exhaustion, and occasionally if it was Sunday we played the devious and manipulative (but in retrospect, pretty funny) God-card on our Jesus-loving father, reminding him that the Lord commands us to rest on the Sabbath and his orders sounded contradictory. I can't believe he put up with us all those years. As we got older the three of us learned to do our work with mostly good attitudes. And when our dad started to trust my sisters with tools like the leaf blower and chainsaw, it even became somewhat enjoyable. Any kid who was subjected to hours of weed pulling, hole-digging, hedge-trimming, and stuffing thorny foliage into brown lawn bags, is bound to learn the classic virtues veiled in light manual labor, getting dirty, and collecting a few scratches and splinters here and there. But aside from anything character building, one of the most valuable lessons I picked up in my amateur landscaping days is how to tell the difference between Toxicodendron radicans and Parthenocissus quinquefolia. That is, poison ivy and Virginia creeper. Both plants are around the same size, have the same coloring, same leaf shape, and grow in the same environments. Poison ivy has three leaves and does horrible things. It makes perfectly good people become puffy, discolored, uncomfortable, and contagious. Virginia Creeper has five leaves and does nothing at all. The problem is the two can look so similar; it's easy to mistake a harmless patch of leaves for a sea of something poisonous. 

During those years growing up in Atlanta’s suburbs I lived in a neighborhood with a gaggle of other curious children, some who also had to do yard work, and others whose parents let the pros handle it. Any given day after barreling off the school bus we could be found trolling and trespassing through strangers' back yards, stashing our bikes and backpacks between boxwoods, and setting out on foot to explore, presumably in search of a suitable headquarters for our mischief. Occasionally we came to a rocky creek that we would valiantly ford. Other times we had to jump a rusty fence or crawl through a gap in some scraggy hedges. Few barricades would deter us, and the particularly lionhearted soldiers ended up with a cast - or if they were lucky, crutches - to prove it. But one thing we were always wary of was poison ivy. If you touched it, it was game over, and we simply knew better. We were girl scouts and boy scouts, after all.

When we set out to adventure with bright eyes, fast bikes, and low expectations, the world was alive - host to a grand scavenger hunt we got to take part in. The very last thing any of us wanted to stumble upon was a poisonous sprawl lying between where we were and where the next treasure might hide. Traversing a creek only to promptly face a devastating obstruction on the pathway to magic can be absolutely crushing. And while at times, yes, poison ivy spanned too far to navigate and we had to find a new route, there were other times - more frequently than not - when we simply needed to look a little closer at what was impeding our progress and make sure it wasn't just a patch of Virginia creeper playing tricks on us. Having the simple knowledge of this subtle difference could make or break an entire day of exploration. It was the difference between forging on to find an abandoned barn or cluster of magnolia trees (nature's perfect fort, as any southern child knows), and giving up, turning around, and going home to watch Nickelodeon in someone’s dimly lit basement.

Learning to spot the difference between what is truly dangerous versus what is just scary can arguably make or break a life over the course of time. It is the difference between moving forward and backing down; saying yes and saying never mind; growing and recoiling; stepping out in faith and shrinking back in apprehension. It's not to say fear isn’t palpable, indeed it can paralyze and captivate, but fear has no place in our ultimate reality – the Good reality that lasts forever. Fear occasionally helps us avoid real danger, but there are other times - more frequently than not - we let fear sprawl across its boundaries and block us from experiencing a whole lot of goodness, too. Such trickery requires heightened vigilance on our part. We need to make sure we’re looking close enough at the actual matter in front of us to see it for what it truly is, because it just may happen the poison ivy we’re so afraid of is only a patch of Virginia creeper.

Springtime is Here.

{and my heart is swelling with joy.}

I haven't worn a coat in almost 2 weeks, I can go for a walk outside without survival instincts dictating my pace ("run faster or you will freeze and die," they say), and everywhere I look: flowers, green.

Lucky for me I live in Atlanta where greenery knows no bounds (though unfortunately, nor does pollen), and I can combine running, botanizing, aaaand listening to NPR podcasts into one, invigoratingly nerdy experience.

The act of running past pristinely landscaped West Atlanta homes, flanked by Boxwoods and brimming with Flowering Quince, Hellebores, and Dogwood, breathes life into my bored and tired eyes. It reminds me that the strange and beautiful things I try to put on paper and canvas are hardly original at all, and do not hold a flame to the arrestingly graceful perfection of something so delightful as Wisteria. They also remind me that "earth tones" include magenta and chartreuse (see: Azalea, Forsythia).
These magnificent things grow naturally out of the dirt - wild, intricate, audacious, weird, fantastic.

Springtime is here. Take it in, folks.

For thoughts on the significance of seeds being buried, staying there for a while, then shooting out of the ground into something unimaginably beautiful (in relation to Easter), listen here. 

New Space, New Paints.

Hi, friends.

It's been a minute.

Re-cap: The teaching job came and went, it ruled, there are some awesome high schoolers out there. There are also some hellions trapped inside deceivingly grown-up-looking human bodies.
I miss them often.

January came to a close, February made her introduction, and then something weird occurred: I found myself working as an artist full-time. I am wildly unprepared, unequipped, skeptical and thankful. I don't know what I'm doing, but I try to pretend I do.
The Giver has been good to me, that's for sure.

I share studio space at the Goat Farm with a dear friend, Ashton (look at her work, it's magnificent), and a man who runs a theatre production company. It's not a forever-studio, but it's about four times the space I was working with before now, so I'll take it! Our across-the-hall neighbors are photographers and my first day working in the new space they were having a shoot to the musical stylings of what I can only assume was an explicit Ray-J Pandora station. That's when I knew I would feel at home there wouldn't get bored there.

Art installation at The Goat Farm by David Baerwalde

Feathered trolls at the studio

A peek of some recent work, currently on view at Anne Irwin

 And I feel I must share a few of these photos the remarkable friend/encourager/photographic wizard Christina Devictor snapped of me during a live-painting session at RoCo... because she creates beautiful images that deserve to be shared, and makes me look like a really fun mad scientist in the best way possible.