It’s a Shop

The first project to talk about here is this shop drop of December 2022. I was given the gift of a part-time role with room and board in 2022. It even came with a studio space. I wanted to get into a flow state and just make after all the years of working multiple jobs, trying to get startups off the ground, and then, in 2020, losing my job just before a global pandemic that shut down hiring. After 9 months of unemployment, I took an entry level job at a grocery store for a year, just to have somewhere to be and something to do with the anxiety I felt in the middle of the pandemic. I could have made more money staying on unemployment, honestly, but it truly felt good to put in a day of work baking cookies, personalizing cakes, making lattes, and counting inventory at 4am. After six months at the grocery store, still applying and interviewing for other roles, it became apparent that it wasn’t working for me financially to keep working a low-wage job and stay in my little apartment.

How I grieved this loss of home! I have grieved every home I’ve ever left to an unreasonable degree. I feel a deep longing for home, and it isn’t at all connected to pragmatic human need for basic shelter. The space I occupy is something primally important to me, though for most of my life it’s been rentals and roommates, not any space I could totally make my own. For my nine years in Seattle, I worked hard to keep a home of my own—but the cost became too great, in terms of financial stability, and—as many discovered in the early pandemic—for the loneliness and isolation of being a single woman living alone and hours from family.

This 2022 offer of space and home meant so much to me; it moved me closer to many family members, for one. With all of the barriers to making art removed, I hoped that I could walk into my studio at some point after moving, organizing, and setting up the space and just…start working. And that’s not what happened. I walked into my studio each day, and felt…aimless. confused. afraid. anxious. I struggled to get started. I organized. I cleaned. I prepped canvases and boards. I organized again. I made paint, encaustic medium, encaustic gesso. I taped off the edges of blank boards. I gessoed over old and unfinished canvases. I thought by focusing on the newness of blank space, something would eventually occur.

It didn’t—not in a big, obvious way.

And no one was more disappointed by that than me. Disappointed, I tried to keep showing up, even if it was just to be in the space for a while, even if what I did there was watch a tv show, read a book, or write for a while. I talked on the phone with friends as I doodled, toyed with watercolors, tested materials, and experimented with clay or ink or pencil. I made a few things. It felt like pushing a rock uphill, and I struggled with direction and purpose.

There was deeper, less productive work to be done. I needed to grieve some things, and process other things after nearly a decade of desperately believing that work would someday, somehow, save me and give me the home and stability and freedoms I wanted—only to face layoffs, startup fails, unemployment, and, finally, burnout following yet another hopeful round of the carnival of broken dreams, disappointed belief, and unkept promises.

I needed to stare blankly into space, watch the weather, listen to the rain on the metal roof of my shop, talk at length with dear friends. I baked bread. I spent time with my nieces, listened to podcasts and audiobooks, and did some deep learning. Not everyone gets the chance to do this work, and I am grateful, although it didn’t look like I thought it would.

I did The Artist’s Way process and wrote morning pages. I read books on process. I took classes. I went on long walks. I started working with a coach, and meeting with a spiritual director.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, things began to happen the more I showed up, determined to make something to fight the darkness. Then the year of time was up and I had to move again, another home proved temporary. As I packed up and grieved another loss, I began to find that I had made more than I realized. I had played around with watercolor for a few years, and during the pandemic, I started painting abstract botanicals in watercolor, adding ink-pen lines, and then tearing the piece into post-card-size pieces and sending them out to friends. This process of painting, defining, dividing, and then sending out these little puzzle-messages to the four corners of the earth became precious to me.

summer garden watercolor and ink on paper, torn into postcards

When I didn’t know what to do in the shop, and I felt the passage of my one year weighing on me, I would sometimes do these little groups of watercolor paintings. It allowed me to explore and be playful with composition and color. Landscape, especially the one outside my own window here in the Pacific Northwest, has always hummed in my bones and echoed in my interior story.

Rooted as they are in landscape, there are elements of fantastic and surreal colors and intuitive forms in some of them. Just like my little watercolor postcards that were inspired by real forms, but abstracted by form, light, and the movement and transparency of the watercolor paint itself, these landscapes show me more than just what is visible to the eye.

Landscape, the created world, is the original human home. The beauty of a sunset, a shoreline, a rainbow’s fall, the light after a storm just before sunset, the deep gray rainclouds, and the neon green of spring grass, the clear and distant cut of a mountain line against the sky reminds me we were meant to have a home. And it wasn’t just a shelter—it was a place of beauty. It wasn’t temporary, but eternal.

Not what I expected as a body of work I hoped to develop over the year, but I’ve come to love and treasure them, and now it’s time to let them go. Those works comprise the bulk of this shop launch, although I have a few acrylics and encaustics listed, too.

One of the goals I had made with my coach was to do a show or sell some work this fall. So here I am, on the cusp of Christmas, working to a deadline to try this selling-my-own-art thing.

It scares me. It’s weird to sell your own creativity, to price paintings, to assign a dollar value to something you made…to deal with taxing and shipping it. But I’m working on the faith it takes to share my work with people who like and want it in their lives and in their homes, and especially those who, like me, long for a home and the saving grace of beauty.

So here it is; the shop launch.

Thanks for being here.