A rare sunny day at Seward Park

I feel like I'm hibernating. I haven't been out much and I've been hunkered down in my studio making a lot of artwork. I'm also changing up my art process. I used to work with multiple layers of colored paper sort of like a screen printing process. But now I'm cutting individual pieces of paper and placing them by hand. It's more labor intensive that way but it saves a lot of paper. It's actually not hard to do if I'm just making one of each design.

I was really inspired by my trip to Arizona last fall and I have all these photos of cacti and mesquite trees that I'm converting into sketches and then art. I like the geometric aspects of my art but I also want to include my love of nature in these pieces. The end result is turning into structured art that has some idiosyncrasies of nature built into it.

 A work in progress based on leaf morphology.  

Another work in progress inspired by cattails and manna grass.

More work in progress inspired by mesquite trees.

• Gráinne Nagle's collages are so fun and colorful. I especially like the corrugated pieces that add texture to her work.
• Jason Gubbiotti started using unconventional materials while he was in lockdown. The end result is some very original and whimsical art.
• These intricate paper pieces by Japanese artist Rakuko Naito are both elegant and complex at the same time.
• The woven paintings by SF artist Alicia McCarthy are mesmerizing. She's in the documentary Tell Them We Were Here that I'm hoping to see later this year.
• Two newsletters that I'm into right now: Oliver Burkeman's The Imperfectionist and David Epstein's Range Widely.
• The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene uses stories from history to help us understand our fellow human beings. I thought the chapter on gender rigidity was especially good.
• The Eyes of Tammy Faye was extremely well done and super entertaining. The movie followed her story to a T from the 2000 documentary narrated by RuPaul.
• Like many people, I loved seeing the Kusama infinity mirror rooms when they came to Seattle. I thought the Kusama Infinity documentary did a good job of covering her struggles in New York before she made it big.
• I enjoyed the Mary Shelley movie. It showed the difficulties she endured before writing her first novel. Also, see the Drunk History version of her coming up with the Frankenstein story. Hilarious!
• The final season of Dickinson was great. I loved the scenes of her hanging out in her room writing and designing the perfect writing dress.
  
  

Power lies in exploring that middle range between the masculine and the feminine, in playing against people’s expectations.

—Robert Greene

Every time I have had a problem, I have confronted it with the axe of art.

—Yayoi Kusama

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