Hello friend.
Happy 2024!
If this is your first newsletter from me, welcome! If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, hello again and thank you for your ongoing attention—you may notice some changes here as we ease into 2024.
We are in the depths of Winter here in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S.
Unusually, we’ve been graced with a fair dose of sunshine recently, so I’ve spent several days clearing away the huge black buckets of soil in which the previous owners grew potatoes, in preparation for planting a small orchard in Spring.
It’s hard work. The buckets are so big I have to shovel out the deep, black earth into a wheelbarrow before I can manoeuvre the container out of the way. Then I have to push the wheelbarrow to the compost heap and shovel the soil out again. My back is hurting and there are still fifteen buckets to empty.
But I love being outdoors more than anything and gradually I’m seeing the structure of the vegetable garden appear. The fruit trees have been ordered and I’ve scratched out a tentative plan for where they might be planted.
Working on the land is always the right decision for me. It ticks all the Blue Zones boxes: gives me purpose, keeps my body strong and supple, relaxes my agitated brain, and fingers crossed, we’ll get some fresh food out of it next year.
Winter garden work is slow but rewarding.
In the studio, Winter work is not going so well.
Since Winter Solstice I’ve opened up the studio only once to move a couple of boxes into storage, making room for an easel. I don’t actually have the easel yet but I recently flicked through Mr C’s copy of ‘Fine Woodworking’ magazine and saw plans for an “artful easel” crafted from beech and pear wood.
“It’ll take a while.” Mr C responded when I showed him the plans.
That’s code for, “Maybe you should buy yourself one.”
For around fifteen years I’ve worked with a seasonal framework of making that I call Wild Creative Practice. In Winter, I don’t make art—or at least, nothing substantial—instead, I spend a lot of time thinking about the structure of my practice and what changes I want to make when I re-open the studio doors in Spring.
Sometimes the thinking becomes a zine complete with photos of my art. Sometimes it becomes writing or a course, and sometimes it’s just a hundred pages of scribbled notes in a journal.
Some might frame this thinking as New Year’s Resolutions, and if you had to twist my arm to force me to squeeze out some resolutions for 2024 that might last longer than the box of chocolates currently sitting on my desk, the list might look something like this:
Be me
Seek beauty
Stay in love with art
Grow flowers & food
Keep my edges soft
The crux of art (for me at least) is the continual journey of becoming me. And just when I think I’ve reached “me”, I change or life changes me, and off I go again trying to align my art with who I am. It’s a lifetime’s journey, for sure, and has nothing to do with making reels or crafting great headlines to make sure you click on my emails or any of the marketing nonsense I’ve been fed lately.
That balance between aligning the art to “me” and sharing the art so others know who I am is a wobbly one. Am I “me” if I never tell others who I am? How much of “me” am I prepared to give up to let others see me? What would happen if I never showed others who I am? Who am I anyway? Existential stuff.
Figuring all that out is as hard as shovelling soil out of the potato buckets.
Anyhoo, in this monthly Studio View blog-type series, the first email you receive from me every month, I’ll be sharing more about Wild Creative Practice and how it plays out in my daily studio life. If you’re a reader who asked me to write more about my art, thank you! I sometimes forget to give you a Private View of my creative practice and I’m happy to oblige.
Here’s to 2024, in which I do me, you do you, and we all come together to build a more tolerant and equitable art world.
Until next time.
JC
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PS
I’m sort of beta-testing a new course in 2024 called RockStar Artist Manifesto. It’s all about becoming YOU and aligning your art to who you are, in all your shapeshifting, beautiful forms. And it’s also about courage: the courage to show who you are through your artwork even when the art world says what you create is not for them. And so it’s also about self-acceptance and not giving a f*** what others think.
(It’s about all that, and more. Like I said, I’m beta testing it!)
The messages will be a mixture of written text, audio, video, journal prompts, and will be the monthly offering from me to paid subscribers, sent at the end of each month.
Btw Substack does not allow monthly subscriptions below $5 so the annual subscription is much more cost-effective for you if you can afford it. I’ve dropped the price for the New Year, so it might be a good time to subscribe to this RockStar Artist’s newsletter ;)
The best vegan chocolates available in the U.S. from Compartes (Trust me, I’ve tried them all!)
This video of RockStar Joni Mitchell at Newport Folk Festival 2022. (May we all grow to be elders sitting on a throne, sharing our art.)
Thank you for sharing your thoughts here. I am really looking forward to all that you bring here as a snapshot of all that you bring to the world.
Hi I'm new to substack and very happy to read your thoughtful post (do we call them posts or essays? I'm not sure?) I'm an artist too and I get all that you said. Although, not the heavy lifting in the garden part! Sounds hard work but satisfying. Your easel sounds wonderful, a thing of beauty.