I sat on the studio floor Thursday night with the laptop open and Brazil spread out across two folders, more than six hundred photos, and I could not choose a single one.
Market stalls stacked with fruit I still do not have names for. A woman's hands mid gesture, telling me a story I only half understood through a translator app and a lot of pointing. Steam off the river in the morning before the heat set in. Motorbikes leaned against a blue wall the exact color of the sky an hour before. Texture everywhere. Every photo pulled at a different thread of the trip, and I kept scrolling, stopping, scrolling again, unable to land on chose the handful that belonged together. I have done this before, this particular kind of stuck, and I know by now that forcing it only makes the folder harder to open the next time. Thursday came and went. I did not publish a substack article.
That is not entirely true. I wrote the piece. I just never sent it, because I could not decide what belonged with it. Then I felt something I did not expect. Guilty, maybe. Some flavor of pressure I could not quite name. I turned it over for a few days the way I do, and then I started laughing at myself. Guilty to who? I do not have a boss for this newsletter. Nobody is waiting on me with a clipboard. I do not run a paid version of this thing on purpose, because the day I owe someone a Thursday is the day I stop wanting to write on Thursdays.
I have made peace with being a multipotentialite. I go wide instead of deep in one lane, on purpose, and there is a real cost to that. There is also a real cost to specializing. Either way you are paying for something. The people who go deep in one thing are buying that depth with all the other things they never got around to. The people like me who go wide are buying that range with never being the best at any one of them. I do not think either bill is wrong to pay. I just think most people never actually look at the invoice. I have been paying mine my whole life, in Brazil trips that take three weeks to process and mediums I abandon and come back to on my own schedule, and most days I would not trade it.
Resilience. A lone fern fights its way through a concrete wall in Ebru das Artes Brazil.
Meanwhile, back in the actual studio, plenty was happening whether I wrote about it or not. My friend and mentor Pam Caughy is opening her next round, PRO 6.0, Discover Your Soul and Brave Moves in Design. I love this group. The learning, the openness, the support, the love really. This round I am doing brave moves that are not my mainstay. Sculpey clay monsters for a show in October, a material I have barely touched since my kids were small and made a mess of the kitchen table with it. And silkscreen, which I have not done in over thirty years.
There is no equipment waiting in a drawer for this one. No squeegee tucked away from some earlier phase of my life. I am starting completely from zero, buying frames and emulsion and a squeegee like a person who has never done this before, because in every way that matters, I have not. My hands do not remember what they used to know, because thirty years ago they belonged to someone who has not existed for a long time. That is the whole point. Getting good at anything costs you the years you could have spent getting good at something else, and going back to a medium I abandoned decades ago means paying a little of that cost in reverse. Trading the expert feeling for the beginner one, on purpose, because the beginner one is where the growth actually is. Embrace the fail, truly that is where excitement lives.
City worker Ebru das Artes brazil
I am also restructuring all of my packaging for prints and originals, top to bottom, boxes and inserts and the way a piece gets wrapped before it ever leaves the studio. I expected it to feel like a chore and instead it has been genuinely satisfying, the kind of problem solving that scratches a different part of my brain than painting does. Spreadsheets and material samples spread across the work table instead of paint. Unhurried Letters went to the post office today. I like sending a batch out into the world and finding out later what people made of it. The local gallery sold a few prints and a painting this month. A gallery about fifty miles out sold a larger piece. I am not chasing sales and never have been. If it happens, it happens. I would not turn down the extra income, but that is not the reason any of this gets made.
And the next thing is closing in fast. I leave for a five week stay in Ireland in seventeen days. That means every piece of October's Unhurried Letters has to be finished, printed, and packaged before I go, because my sweetheart is the one dropping them in the mail on the 30th while I am somewhere across the ocean. Nothing sharpens a deadline like knowing you will not be anywhere near the post office when it counts. I have also been invited to be part of the Art Bundle for Good, a big group of art workshops/courses for a ridiculous low price AND it is supporting a nonprofit. More on that as it gets closer. The workshop I have for that needs to be completed before I leave for Ireland also.
So that is where the studio actually is. Full, in the good way. Clay monsters I do not know how to make yet. A silkscreen practice I am building from nothing, not relearning, building. (likely on hild until AFTER Ireland). Packaging getting rebuilt from the ground up. Letters in the mail. A countdown to Ireland ticking down day by day.
And somewhere in a folder on my laptop, a woman's story from a market in Brazil is still waiting for me to figure out how to tell it right. I keep opening that folder. I have not closed it for good, and I have not forced it open all the way either. I used to think that meant I was stuck. I do not think that anymore. Some stories need you to wait them out before they will tell you how they want to be told. I have decided I am allowed to let this one take its time.
The genie stays in the bottle a little longer.
Keep making, keep growing, be you.
Tio
Beauty of Aging. One of hundreds of really fun textures from various parts of Brazil
Fifty-Seven to Fifty-One