She Wondered About Particles

 

Clouds

I marvel at the cloud's shifting, mysterious shapes. How they can expand across the horizon, scatter delicately, or envelope the sun in shades of color.

Clouds are like life experiences; fleeting, constantly moving, changing, sometimes ordinary yet always unique.

I wonder how many people are staring at the clouds right now, taking a photograph of a sky in hopes of sharing it with someone else as if to say “Look at how lucky I was in this moment.”

Sometimes, I’ve photographed the clouds and then time passes and I notice that the clouds look even more marvelous, so I take another photograph. And I wonder what will I do with all of these photographs of the sky?

Perhaps I will make a little book to one day show my daughter how much her mom loved the sky. To make something...anything... to express that achingly beautiful feeling of seeing clouds travel across the sky.

Drawing

One of the most fascinating things is to see what your hand will draw when you simply start without weighing your mind down with any sort of plan of how it will turn out.

Moving the pencil along the paper. Inventing a the rules as you go. Drawing can thrive with uninhibited mark making.

And sometimes I wake from dreams, wondering how on earth my mind concocted those images. Such idiosyncratic feelings and subtle, particular events.

One reason that I make pictures is because I have a wild imagination. If it is not focused and reigned in, the scenarios my mind will cause me all sorts of stress and anxiety. To purposely create poetic stories is empowering.

 

 

Beaming Magic

That Spot In The Library

Oh, libraries. The expected quietness, people reading, studying, learning, thinking. That kind of world is so important for us human beings. 

I used to love going to the library as a kid. At school I felt anxiety but in libraries I felt peace. There was something magical about reading in a seemingly large chair near rows and rows of books. 

Hedgehog Wants To Paint

Yesterday, while I was reading "Writing Picture Books" by Ann Whitford Paul (a fascinating guide), I was thinking of a character I had been imagining. 

The author mentioned many different ways to imagine your story draft, including turning your human character into an animal or your animal character in a human. I have not often drawn animals, but I decided to turn my girl character into a little hedgehog...

And OH MY so many lightbulbs went off. No wonder animals occupy so many children books. We can project so many qualities into animals.

Now I want to draw more hedgehogs.

 

I'll be running after your memory forever

I made this drawing a few weeks ago trying to express a certain feeling of trying to hold the memory of my brother close and not let it leave. I was thinking of how it feels like the memory is intimately close, yet lightyears away. 

This is the first year I have attempted to make a picture describing that feeling, even if it didn't come out the way I envisioned it. There is a landscape of grief that only grievers know. 

I am grateful for art and drawings and poetry and music and everyone who attempts to express those ineffable feelings.