If a writer

is also an artist

is also a designer

(of gardens and homes and journeys)

is also a lover

is also loose loosey in the brain

and is,

most ALSO of all

a mother–

there comes a day,

it’s sunny

it’s Friday

when she is supposed to be doing some things

but ends up doing some other things.

Looks at abandoned sketch books

years and years of scribbled remembrances

and thinks

I like it.

*****

I pulled sketch books off one shelf: (There are more, on more shelves, and in more drawers.)

And picked a sketch book to look at.

It was a long time ago when I did these drawings. I carried sketch books wherever I went and committed fast drawings to the papers hoping to return to them someday.

What a pleasure, to arrive at a time and place when my own artwork is making me smile. For that reason alone, I think it’s worthwhile to carry a sketch book and draw–even if you are always busy tending to other people and other things.

I consistently failed at most kinds of conventional schooling. The voices of teachers “speaking to me” and memories of their eyes rolling into convulsions over my wiggly butt, have kept me out on my own, trying to learn what I can, with the brain I was born with.

The voice of the critics can be so loud. Beware of it. I have no trouble engaging in the practice of drawing, but after I draw, I do have trouble learning to like what I’ve done.

I’m not a scholar. But there is a “call to artists” for work depicting plants and I’m hoping to mine my piles of sketches and put together some things to submit.

Here are the naked sketches:

Look carefully at this next sketch. It’s kind of cool–it’s trees in a sort of hedge? I don’t know. Inside the trees grow my ideas for designs:

Here follows a sketch of one day in spring when I was wandering through the garden and spied a fledgling cowering on the lower branches of a tree. I called my son to come and see and we stood there together laughing at the poor little bird–its feathers were scraggly and unkempt. I have watched so many fledglings in my gardens, I have watched their parents frantically bringing them food, I’ve watched the crows circling, and every season, I worry about all of them!

I don’t know what this next drawing is. But I do know that whenever I was caught drawing these kinds of mind relaxers during class, I got into trouble. In the last couple of years, these same kinds of drawings, elicit similar suggestions from odd ducks who might be sitting next to me in a lecture–have you considered what a psychologist would say about your doodles:

SELF PORTRAIT!

I think this must have been drawn when I was thinking of garden arbors:

Dried milkweed pods in the meadows where I walk most days:

More garden design-y brain work:

A windy day when the plants get blown over and onto my walking paths:

A rose is a rose is only a rose is necessary, necessary, necessary:

SELF PORTRAIT!

And then, after I sketch and sketch and sketch, one day I go into my studio and, without looking at any of my sketches, I start painting. After I painted this zinnia, I didn’t like it. But today, I do. That’s Friday for you!

Here’s a painting I did after a week-long outdoor sketching class in Provincetown. On the horizon, are the sand dunes with little trails. The green part is the marsh as the tide is draining the sea away:

NOW–look at the same painting in sepia tones! It looks like a cool map. I love maps.

Art is inside everyone.

I really believe that.