It’s time to start summer planting, so I transplanted seedlings this week. It’s always a little unnerving to handle these tiny little plants – so delicate. They’re so vulnerable those first few days – I’ve already lost a couple to something digging around that just knocked them right out of the ground. But they always seem to turn into a garden in due time – it’s like planting a little bit of green hope.
Zinnias in waiting - ready to go!
Out of The Studio and In the Garden
Maybe you’ve been away from your work – not for years, just for a stretch. Life got full, or the season changed. And now every day that passes makes it a little harder to walk back in. The thought underneath it all, the quiet one: what if something’s gone and I can’t get it back?
I’ve been feeling that after being in the garden but I know from being here before: the discomfort is a door, not a wall. The work I’ve tried to do has felt stiff and off-key and wrong – everything not sitting right. I’m going back anyway – not because I’ve solved it, but because BEING in that awkwardness and just sitting with it is the only way through.
The plants, the green world, the time outside - that will find its way into the work in ways I can’t name yet. The Creation moves through the actual living of your life, not just the hours you log “at work.” The time in the garden wasn’t stolen from the studio. It was life research.
Something from Another Season of Research
The work in this book came from a specific stretch in the studio – a season where I was aligned closely to the not-yet green world and watching things push through and change shape. The Spring Emergence Collection isn’t instructions. It’s material. Twenty-four background papers, 270+ collage elements – botanical forms, seed pods, mussel shell shapes, painted marks – all sized to tear out and use. Cut the pieces apart. Work with them, mark over them, stitch through them. They’re not precious.
It’s about $15 – about what a cup of good coffee and that enormous muffin at a real coffee shop costs. If you work in collage, mixed media, or art journals, this is working material from someone who makes things every single day.
Wild Creation: Spring Emergence Collection – available on Amazon
For making!
Unquiet Ground – Live in the Studio
I did a live session this week on the Unquiet Ground series and talked about where the series is going as a whole, then worked on the panel that was giving me the most trouble. (Sometimes the one you like least is the one that gives you the most.) If you want to catch the next live session when it happens, subscribe to the YouTube channel and you’ll get a notification when it’s happening.
Artist at work…
What are you putting off going back to, and what would it feel like to just walk in and start anyway? Click reply and tell me, I want to know.
I read every one and I write back.
Be Incandescent,
Monette
PS – If you make collage or mixed media work, the Spring Emergence Collection is on Amazon waiting for you. Working papers, botanical elements, collage pieces – all from a real season in a real studio. Grab it here.
PPS – For the record: the seedlings that got knocked out of the ground this week? I’ll plant new ones. It’s what you have to do…