I don’t know about you, but for me, summer is a confusing time. It’s a seasonal shift that always sends me into a state of insecurity. This year more than ever—I’ve reorganized my life a bit and the pressure for me to bloom my illustration/animation practice is heating up. Everything feels simultaneously joyous and terrifying. The sublime weather of the Northwest daily contrasts with some worldly horror or internal struggle, and it is disorienting.
I’ve been thinking about fields of grass. The grass is turning golden, the deep green of winter is evaporating into the bright blue sky. Something I’m still getting used to in this climate.
Everyone is on vacation! Or in some kind of summer mode—patterns I can’t discern, but over here, I’m working harder than ever. When is the right time to shift gears? When do I take a break, and what do I take a break from?? To start to answer this, I am reminded of a moment several years ago.
It was back in that one-bedroom Seattle apartment, chugging along slowly while still juggling a demanding job curating public programs. Trying to immerse myself in the Seattle art scene, and grapple with how to run education programs in a contemporary art museum.
I managed to show a couple of times, thanks again to my dear friend Lauren Boilini. (Go look her up and be amazed!) There were lots of others there with me, on email, on the phone, at work, at the playground. Community was there, though perhaps a bit scattered.
There were some interesting things happening in my work—things I can look back at and still feel really connected to. I was enraptured by the out-of-control construction and infestation of cranes in the city. Every other block was a site of excavation for some new mini-apartment complex. I took photos and drew imagined structures on top of them—an exercise I like to periodically bring back into my practice.
And I was painting, a fair amount. I used the wall of the living room when I could. I was thinking of the ocean, enjoying the drip and chaos of ink, and finding ways to make big things out of small pieces of paper.
But something was bothering me. Something felt off.
I noticed it after I showed my work in a two-person show at the studio building down the street. The let-down from that show told me that I wasn’t looking hard enough. That I was on some sort of auto-pilot.
Me and auto-pilot are good friends. We’ve run into each other a few times, and I’m starting to understand it better (and it has a lot to do with my need for plurality). But this time was a big one, and I made a very conscious decision. I decided that I was going to take a big break from exhibiting my work.
I decided to give myself a big old permission slip to explore whatever I wanted to. I decided to go out into the meadow. Into that grassy field.
When I was working with public school teachers and Guggenheim teaching artists back in 2010-12, I worked closely with teaching artist Jenny Bevill who lent her teaching strategies to our investigation into “what is creativity?” Going out in the meadow was one of her visuals that she used with elementary students to encourage them to think expansively about topics and content. A way of leaving the familiar, of finding openness. She pushed them to not default to re-drawing characters from television shows and had a slew of drawing exercises she would use to get them into new spaces in their brain.
The visual of an open meadow really resonated with me, as did literal the practice of doing it. As a child, I lived in a valley of hills with grassy meadows lined with forests. As an adolescent, those grassy fields were my anger management tool. When hormones and house became too much to handle, I would run to them.
There are no expectations from the grass. It is simply there for you.
“The land knows you, even when you are lost.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
I had to create a meadow for myself. The architecture of the art world had become suffocating and I needed space.
Simply deciding to take a break from galleries and showing work became the field. It was a retreat. And interesting things started happening. Clumsy, messy, confusing, and strange things.
And I found out I could do more than paint. I found out I had all these stories in my body, a strange character emerged that would become a constant companion. I studied virtual reality technologies, taught myself Blender, watched indie gameplays and started collecting children’s books with a fervor. I made weird sculptures and started drawing a world that felt like a place that I wanted to put words to. For two years, I gave myself space to flounder. I told people I was taking a break from showing. I left museums and moved into the residency world—where the focus was on rest, reflection, and process. I didn’t share my work. Kept it close. And I moved to the Olympic Peninsula, where there were actual grassy fields and forests a plenty.
This week, I needed to write about this time period. Because I’m trying to make the most of a summer “break” and it’s tricky. I’m trying to forge a new path and support myself with freshly polished skills; I’m working with clients on illustration and animation projects, I’m learning new stop motion techniques, it’s summer in the Northwest (read: bliss!) and I have an eight-year-old whose quickly going on nine. I’m part of a couple online communities that are teaching me loads about building a business. They want me to find focus, a direction, and they want me to go all in. I know this is good advice, and yet….
I think I’m in the meadow right now and I want to relish it and learn from it. It’s really scary. It feels dangerously like “making myself small” and denying myself opportunities to be seen. It feels like splitting my focus constantly and changing up directions every four hours. The other day, I literally painted a 70 inch background, needle-felted strange little objects, and then worked on illustrations in procreate. I am someone who has to make the thing before I understand what it is to me. So I’m making A LOT of things right now, sort of all at once. And the impulse to throw them into social media, here, or anywhere there are eyes, is strong. And I’ve been following that dopamine chase here and there for the past couple of weeks. The problem is, when I share things too soon, the opportunities for self-critique start to balloon and run rampant.
Because isn’t the best part of laying in a meadow the part where you look up at the sky and the grass hides the periphery? You and the sky. Dreams in between.
When I took those two years off, one of the best things I did was create a three-day residency for myself in my friend’s spare room. I could write one hundred essays about residencies and the ways they open you up. But before I do that, I’m going to take another one for myself. And so I’m heading to a cabin in the woods for a few days next week. I’ll let you know what play comes out of it.
I share this because I want this for everyone. I want you to find your meadow. Do you have one? How do you get to it?
"You and the sky. Dreams in between." sigh, how lovely!