Spring in the Studio

Hello beautiful people,

Here is a good, old-fashioned vlog about a creative Sunday in the art studio. I don’t have any pearls about this one because after my latest sacrifice to the gods of productivity and ambition, I realized the self-imposed “pressure” of writing something polished about my videos was getting in the way of creating them. So we are recalibrating. :)

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Things I enjoyed this week—

Austin Kleon

’s Show Your Work! is an easy to digest book full of zine-esque doodles and ten pieces of advice on the topic of sharing your creativity with the world. I’m digging it because it under-indexes on clichés and over-indexes on cool kid quotes like: “I saw the Sex Pistols,” said New Order frontman Bernard Sumner. “They were terrible… I wanted to get up and be terrible with them.”

I’ve been enjoying great writers these days and

Suleika Jaouad

is one of those in my book. She also has a knack for building the kind of creative community that I actually want to join. This quote about a speech she gave at Stanford spoke to my heart -

“I spoke about how we live in a society that is obsessed with hustle and productivity, but how when we’re in that mode, each moment becomes a stepping stone to whatever comes next, rather than its own exquisite gem. It dawned on me that despite having spent all last week developing that talk, and having delivered it with complete conviction, I was at risk of doing the exact thing I was cautioning against. So I decided to practice what I preached, and I chose rest. I went for a walk along the bay, stopping to look at lizards and to smell flowers and to admire the Spanish moss dripping from the trees, along with these desiccated resurrection ferns. Do you know about these plants?…” -Suleika Jaouad, The Isolation Journals

Discovered a new art podcast, the artist in me is dead with

Rhonda Willers

(thank you Suleika) and enjoyed her latest convo with Danielle Krysa (aka. the Jealous Curator) on identity, impostor syndrome, and other creative stuff.

And my first baby asparagus sprouted after two years in the making! This is the sole survivor after some unreasonably hot summers here in Austin. My four year old peach tree also might bear fruit for the first time… <3

Over and out,

x Jess