My return to painting began with a Japanese brush laden with sumi ink. From enso as meditation practice, my art evolved into a seven year study on impermanence.

Mirroring the immediacy of my creative process and fleeting nature of reality, I have captured images of sumi paintings with my camera and thrown the original paintings away.  Photos of my ephemeral abstract paintings have never been printed, framed and displayed by design. 

Selections from “a study on impermanence” have been shared through social media and projected in large format with my tale of creative awakening.

After moving into a new artist studio, my oldest child asked “When you return to the studio today, what will you paint first?”

“Honestly, I am tired from packing and moving and unpacking and anticipation of this moment” I said. “I’ll start tomorrow.” Both children have witnessed over the years this familiar refrain when it goes to doing something I really want for myself, put it off until tomorrow.

My resistance was met with encouragement when my son, experienced in redirecting his 3 young children, kindly suggested “Why don’t you just go in and draw a bee? You like bees. Just one drawing. Text it along to us and then head home.”

Because he doesn’t do Facebook, he suggested I keep up the ritual of drawing, painting, photographing and text a copy daily.

That’s how I began….

When Don Lindgren* saw my drawing of Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in July, he asked me to create drawings for his presentation at the 2017 Symposium of Food and Cookery in Oxford UK. He envisioned simple line drawings to help illustrate “ingredient mapping” process used to study antique cookbooks.

Happily diving into the project, I visited Strawbery Banke in Portsmouth NH and Laudholm and Spiller Farms in Wells ME for inspiration, and put my pencil to paper.

These drawings were included in his award-winning presentation and paper “Food & Landscape, Steps Toward an Ecology of the Cookbook: Landscape in the Cookbook and the Cookbook in its Landscape.”

From the experience, I discovered that I like drawing as much as I like photographing. In August, I moved into Running with Scissors Artist Studios with sharpened Toison D’Or 8B pencil in hand.

*Don Lindgren is a rare bookseller, appraiser and cataloger of literary and artistic archives of significance, and founder with his wife Samantha Hoyt Lindgren of Rabelais Fine Books on Food & Drink. He serves on the Board of Governors of Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, a member of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, the Ephemera Society of America, and the Wayward Tendrils.

In the interest of living more lightly on the land, I sold my two large old drafty New Englanders and bought a much newer energy efficient little house.

While I gave most of my belongings away before the move, my books were/are the hardest to part with. A year into this experiment, I am ready to let go of them or at least some of them.

This is the plan:

In 2020 I plan to work my way through my collection (two personal libraries worth), use title pages as prompts for drawings that I’ll insert somewhere in the book before I deliver them to Goodwill, used bookstores….

My intention is to create a disciplined practice of making something everyday day and to surprise anyone who buys the used books with an original drawing.

Have created a new instagram account Title Page Artist to log my daily drawings and will post here less often. Let me know what you think of this project….