No.28 The blanket fort of the soul

It is, as ever, a trial to live in interesting times.

Image: Diptych with snow. Two 10" x 10" mixed media wooden panels that make up an abstracted, interrupted view of a snow-covered landscape. These might be finished, or nearly there.

Sometimes the only things that can provide a little peace are the small things within our (seeming) control. It’s probably the reason for the preponderance of self help, self care content in recent years.

Art is my interpretation of ‘self care’. It’s the method by which I uncover and create meaning. Funny thing is, I’ve been wrestling with how to exert less control in my art.

Maybe I’m looking for a way to embrace the uncertainty and vulnerability inherent to being someone with any kind of emotional range. A way to show up with all my faults and baggage, unpolished and true. If I can’t do that in my art, then I don’t know where.

+ + +

Image: What ‘play’ looks like; building castles, conjuring weather

I love January and February— months frequently loathed, or seen in terms of having to ‘make it through’. In this post-holiday stretch of ostensible boredom and gloom, I happily hermit. I tend to think of it as hibernation, but it’s not a slothful hiding away to take naps* and the like. I just take the opportunity of lousy weather to be social as little as I can get away with, and indulge my non-work time in making art, reading, and pottering around, being in my thoughts; giddy over weekends in which I can do whatever I please.

I’ve been undertaking a lot of experimentation and discovery time in sketchbooks and on panels / paintings, continuing the work I began in Karen Stamper’s sketchbook class I took in late 2024.

I find it difficult to be as BOLD on the panels as in the books, so I’m alternating back and forth between the two to keep that loose energy, that sense of ‘what if?’, trying things out and seeing where it leads me. Looking for new marks, new ways of visualizing and using materials, that feel native to me when I stumble across them.

Image: Several spreads of a new concertina sketchbook, in which I’m continuing an exploratory approach; making marks, pasting things in— calling, responding.

The thing is, I have the skills to create images that ‘look like the thing’— but I want more than to accurately interpret something that can be seen. I want to develop a language for describing the inner world; to make images that are portals—for me, but equally important, for others— to enter an other-world, a dream-world.

Something familiar and welcoming that doesn’t exist.

Something that transports you momentarily into the blanket fort of the soul, where all things exist at once and the curve of time is an eternal string of softly winking lights.

This is what the art that I love most does to me.

How about you?

+ + +

Recent reads:
I recently devoured A Model World by Michael Chabon— there’s much to love in it, not least of which the instantly recognizable and palpable atmospheres that he manages to capture / create in every story. (The Goodreads audience seem to feel differently).

Before that: The Baron in the Trees, by Italo Calvino. While it may not reach the dizzying heights of Invisible Cities, it’s nonetheless a magical place to hang out for awhile. (Definitely a blanket fort of the soul.) (GR audience aggregates only 4 stars for Invisible Cities?! Ugh, dilettantes!)

That’s it for now. I’ll keep posting art bits ’n bobs in Substack Notes til next time.

x Liz

*although, truly, naps sometimes happen