It was this book, as well as my reading of Herbert Read’s Icon and Idea, which is my close reading text for this Early Summer season, that has me thinking about the role of repetition and pattern in neolithic textiles as well as the value of actually making the artifacts under study. This is something Barber does in the very first pages of her book, explaining how weaving a copy of a wool plaid from a prehistoric salt mine showed her that the artifact was being displayed sideways, that what appeared to be the warp was surely the weft. Read spends time talking about how ancient artists began with the capability to make lively and vital images of animals and only moved away from representational to geometric art after millennia, suggesting that geometric art is not evidence of a lack of representational skill. I can testify that this is true, it takes a lot of work to make evenly repeated stripes.

But, it was my recent reading of Icon and Idea that made me notice something very intriguing in one of the last banners that I painted for my Groundwork series last summer. The banner features an Orphic egg, which is the snake that Greek mythology believes was a deity that existed prior to our universe, and squeezed out the egg from which our universe was born. Because I was focusing on snakes and had been teaching about Minoan or properly Cretan (King Minos is a Greek invention from later) fashion. The Cretan fashion from the Neolithic era includes the use of strong diagonal motifs in the depictions of fashion, such as the Mistress of Animals, which I shared in a previous post or this Minoan Lady from the Akrotiri Frescoes, shared under the common license with attribution to Mark Cartwright.

I have been painting the above ground and below ground in these Groundwork banners, and so I went looking for photographs of rock features in Crete that I could use as part of my painting. Of course, I went looking for Karst and underground formations, but one link led me to a beautiful photo, which you can see in the photo below, of a rock formation that features an alternating color of undulating diagonal rock face.

This is so intriguing, because this ancient motif, this border form found throughout textile traditions worldwide, is in fact something that these ancient artisans could have seen just looking at nature. Pattern recognition is an essential human drive, and one that makes more modern forms of art that are less representational, the abstract art, so enjoyable. We are designed as creatures to search out patterns and to create our own sense of meaning from what we are seeing. Assembling the meaning that we see is an innate human ability, and it can be very pleasurable. Finding patterns in nature is a deep evolutionary need, not a silly game.

The Neolithic geometric tradition is therefore not just a primitive precursor to the purple border on a senator’s toga. These stripes, these pottery borders, these textile bands, are all a conversation that we have been having with nature, with the products of artists throughout thousands of years. Which takes us to the moment of excitement on my part. I was painting something, and the painting itself revealed to me a connection between a natural rock formation and the textiles that I had been studying. Translating something into my personal context as art allowed me to see this connection. My textual knowledge ended up being the lens through which I saw that natural phenomenon, but I didn’t know I was looking for it until after I created this piece of art. Another argument for making as an essential form of knowing, as a kind of research.

So for my History of Fashion class in the future, I can have more conversations with students about how the motifs and features that we are seeing are not necessarily simplistic stripes or hearts or diamonds, but are reflections of the natural world, patterns that have become meaningful to us as human beings. Another reason to continue reading in order to have a conversation with myself, with my students, and with the authors who are theorizing on these subjects.

Thank you for reading what emerges from my process.

Gwendolyn

And, you can imagine my surprise when I work up on the day after Memorial Day to discover that, because of a course scheduling error, I was on vacation! My summer teaching, focusing on online entrepreneurship, won’t start until June 30th, and now, instead of being “on”, I need to make the most of my time “off”. This means it is the perfect time to share what I have been learning from my close reading of a book called Icon and Idea by Herbert Read, which I got from AbeBooks. As we entered Early Summer in the middle of April, I made it a season of study by close reading this one book slowly over the course of the eleven weeks the season lasts. Picking this book was a way to add some scholarly thought about art to my life. I also encountered Herbert Read when I was doing some previous work on art education and thinking about how I was teaching my teacher certification students to teach others how to sew.

This book is an example of the genuine scarcity of good art education materials. Quite a lot of what exists is about how to make art, but there’s not nearly as much on how to teach art. Having discovered Herbert Read, I found this book, which is a set of lectures. When I received it, I discovered it was probably going to be an excellent read. The book, which I can take a day or two at a time and practice my handwriting by transferring portions of it into my journal, provides a meditative scholarly activity. In choosing which portions to transcribe, I discovered some of his ideas really struck me, so let me share his central claim.

Art came first. Before mythology, religion, and all kinds of other symbolic thought, the capacity to externalize your feelings into something that you can see or touch is not the byproduct of human consciousness, it is actually the driver of it. We don’t have feelings because we’re human. We are human because we have learned how to externalize our feelings. This externalization of sensory input is the engine of human consciousness, not a byproduct. Mythology, science, philosophy, symbolic language, coding, all of this is downstream of the artistic impulse.

“A great part of the modern culture, even the part of it we designate as fine art, is now only distantly related to the process of sensation as such. Just as the process of reasoning can proceed on the basis of signs and symbols which involves no sensational response, so now the process of art proceed on the basis of tropes and images which are not derived from individual experience but are so many counters acquired on the cultural exchange. Schools and academies are established which teach men not to use their senses, not to cultivate their awareness of the visible world but to accept certain canons of expression and from these to construct rhetorical devised whose subtlety appeals to reason rather than sensibility. Art becomes a game, played according to conventional rules. Or it becomes a science.”

— Herbert Read, Icon and Ideas, p. 87

This quote became really relevant to me as I think about large language models. This pattern manipulation that they do, having ingested all of our symbolic content, happens with no actual sensory understanding. An LLM can talk about a teapot, but it doesn’t know what it feels like to hold one between your hands, warm on an early morning when your fingers feel stiff, the relief of that warmth on arthritic joints. It knows what we say about those things, but it doesn’t know what those things actually feel like.

I want to name this parallel explicitly. Following symbolic rules without sensory grounding is what LLMs do, and Read is saying this is also what academic art training risks producing. This is another moment where I’m grateful that my training was in craft, in the actual experience of making something. Learning what it feels like to detect the subtle changes in the strength of a fiber as I press a razor blade against it, knowing that this fiber is the sewing thread and not the woven thread that the garment I am dexterously cutting apart is made from. I have this sensory experience, and only now am I thinking about the symbolic nature of the work I am producing using my human body.

This also makes me think about Michael Pollan’s A World Appears, which has been a companion to this reading. Pollan’s argument is that consciousness requires sensory assembly, not just symbolic processing. A tree is potentially conscious. An LLM is not, and may not be, with the current tools at our disposal.

What I am really thinking through as I read is how to help my students stay grounded in the sensory nature of their experience, and then, as future educators, how to help them communicate that sensory nature to their own students. We are not making a felt envelope because the felt envelope means anything in the abstract. We’re making the felt envelope because the act of stitching along its edge teaches the student what it feels like to make those stitches. Then we talk about it while looking at each other’s stitches, touching them, discussing how they are shaped and what we can know from seeing each other’s work, and how that communicates to us our own task of making. The sensory experience comes first. The meaning comes after.

All in all, I end up being very grateful that I have had a craft education grounded in sensory experience rather than an art education grounded primarily in symbolic content. I’m grateful that I had that experience first, so that as I now make my way through works related to the symbolic content of art, I am reflecting on that meaning in relation to my own sensory experience. This act of slow reading, using an actual physical book which is in itself a sensory experience, is bringing up questions I will sit with through the remaining days of this Early Summer season.

Thank you for reading what emerges from my process.

Gwendolyn

There are two trails that come out from the trailhead here. One is called Dante’s, and the other is a handicapped-accessible trail, which is very nice for a leisurely stroll because it’s been groomed. But it lacks these stones with circular holes that remind us of the nature of the earth on which we’re walking. Another reason that I like this particular trail is because it’s more shaded. Early summer is the time to enjoy this particular path, as it winds its way away from the highway and moves down towards a creek bed.

These blue flowers, Asiatic Daylilies, I was reading, are wonderful environmental survivors. They remind me of Spiderwort, which we have back home in Colorado, but these are slightly different, with two little blue “mouse ears” instead of three matched petals. It’s nice to see a little friend that reminds me of my earlier biome. The pathway winds down towards the creek bed, where I’m told I’ll need to be careful for mosquitoes.

Today is the first month after the school year has ended, and I decided to take a hike today, in part, to symbolize my freedom from the school year. Oh, look, there are some tender ferny kind of plants. I’ll really enjoy painting those. The smell of wild nature, and the longer vistas, so different from the hours spent on the computer, which is what my role as a university professor has become.

I am now a knowledge worker, like a metalworker or a woodworker, as if knowledge were a block of stone and I’m a stone worker, working the refined knowledge out of this block of stone. While this knowledge work that I do does require a certain physical effort: a hunched-over posture, a grip, tightened curled fingers on the keyboard kind of effort, a hike in the woods can provide relaxation and relief from the strain.

The sound of the highway has faded, and I am now beginning to be enveloped in the sensory pleasure of a moment in the woods. A monarch, zipping back and forth across the trail before finally settling on a stone, and then on a flower. Is it a monarch or another? If it will stop moving, even just for a moment, I can see more of the wings. It seems to have a bit more of a dusky brown color near the base than I would expect from a monarch. Yes, as it’s now settled under a bush, it’s half orange-spotted on top and mostly all dusty brown on the bottom set of wings. These are the beautiful kinds of things that we can notice in the early summer woods. It isn’t too hot to be enjoyed.

And the scent. It rained last night, but not enough that my hiking pole sinks too deeply, just enough to bring out the beautiful scent of the earth. I like the hiking pole because it is still just a little bit tricky for me. I’ve always been kind of a wobbly person. It’s the downside of flexibility. Flexibility is wonderful, but occasionally, as you step on a rock, you can flex right into another direction.

A breeze picked up and lifted the edge of my one shirt, circled around my neck. I decided to grow my hair out again. I’m just not used to needing this much sunscreen on the back of my neck. But the breeze feels good.

And here’s the creek bed. I was warned that it might be full of water and harbouring mosquitoes, but it has now dried out. Was that quick, after last night! There’s a little natural dam with dammed-up leaves. This part of the woods reminds me of scenes from Lord of the Rings. At this point I can stay on the trail called Dante, or I could go off on Pariaso, but I think I’m going to continue on Dante. It will pop up on the main trail and allow me to make a loop back to my car.

You know, in this part of the forest, where the trees are all standing so close together, I can’t help but remember Michael Pollan’s image from his latest book on consciousness “A World Appears”, where he talked about how all of the interesting things of the tree, the brain, everything that’s sensing, all of it is below ground, where they’re spreading their roots and reaching out to each other and intermingling. And what we see above ground is just their rear ends, so to speak. And I love this picture of walking through all of these trees that have their heads stuck under the ground.

I’ll find one at a certain point and sit down right next to it and lean into it and see if I can hear anything. I can hear the sound of the wind in the leaves. I can see all the ants climbing back and forth along the surface of the tree. The moss is growing on the tree. The season of early summer is wet and mossy, at least this year, because we’re waiting to hear if we’re going to start an El Niño year and have a bit more water than usual.

Here, we’re in a spot where some people might describe this rocky system as cliffs, but I wouldn’t really describe them as cliffs. It’s more like a little fault in the ground. And here is a natural stone bench made with all of the holes in the rock, an overleaning tree. If I keep walking along the trail, Dante will take me to the Grandmother Oak, and there’s a space that people have built in a clearing nearby among all of the juniper trees for a sort of outdoor school gathering. And I love this idea of a teacher set in a meadow for children travel to.

Last year I read “Playing Big” by Tara Mohr and I did her exploration about the future self, my inner mentor, where she guided me into imagining myself twenty years in the future. When I arrived in my future, I was surprised to encounter somebody who was like that Grandmother Oak, a person that people traveled to see and spend time with. And having had that vision, I’m taking steps to rearrange my life in order to make that vision true, thinking about how I can be nurturing and mentoring all of the people around me, both young and old, and making a space, a clearing under my branches, where we can sit together and listen to the wind together and think about what all of it means.

I have a little detour to make. I did not bring my dog with me today, as I mentioned before, because it can interfere just a bit with my own contemplation, and when she gets really excited about things it can make it a little bit difficult to keep my own balance, which makes city streets a bit more suitable for our jaunts together. But I sure do love my little dog, and I love taking care of her and thinking about what she needs and trying to enrich her life.

Michael Pollan was talking about sentience and how it’s different from consciousness, and he brought up the mirror test. The mirror test that humans can’t pass until they’re about eighteen months old. The test is called the mirror test, and the idea is: can they understand that what they’re looking at is a reflection of themselves and not confuse it with just another baby, another parrot, another cat? They do this by surreptitiously placing a sticker dot or a mark of some kind on the forehead of the creature and observing whether or not the creature sees the mark and realizes that they’re seeing their own reflection, that they must have a mark on them, and in the case of the toddler, reaches up their chubby hand to touch and find the sticker on their forehead.

Apparently, dogs were failing this test. But it turns out it’s because we have a sensory bias. Standing here in the forest, I close my eyes and reach out with my other senses. If there was a mirror hanging in the forest, I would see it. But what would a mirror be like if I was using my other senses? Using a dog’s sense of smell, of course, we know this now. Dogs are presented with a little canister of their own urine, a canister of another dog’s urine, or a canister of some other scent, like aniseed. The dogs react differently to their own urine, puzzled, as if to say: how did this get here? That’s me. Which makes you realize that for dogs the whole world may be a kind of scent story, where occasionally they’re presented with a mirror, as if, when we were walking down a hall or through a crowd, looking at all these people, we suddenly just saw ourselves. How odd that would be. What a different way of encountering the world, to smell a marker that you had left that said: I was here.

There’s so much more to the world than just what we see. All of the senses of the dog come into play to help them get through the world. How limited we are when we just stick with our vision.

Winding my way towards the grandmother oak, I pass the bearded oak, which is just a landmark and, to be honest, is much less glorious than it used to be. It’s an oak with a hugely scarred and bulbous trunk that apparently, if you look at it in just the right angle, can look like a face with a beard. I’ll be honest. I can’t really see it. Maybe it’s the weather. Just past this bend is where Dante rejoins Styx, the main trail, so it is good landmark.

But this anthropomorphizing of nature, shouldn’t we try it the other way around? Shouldn’t I be thinking about the ways in which I can be like a tree? Not the ways the tree is like me? Connecting with all those around me, searching out rich nutrients, finding ways to share the light, to share the water, to share the forest, knowing that the shelter we create brings up the young, which we can nurture into a posture of connectivity rather than just one of dominance or challenge, knowing that as we begin to lean, the trees around us will support us for a while. All these lessons in a wood. The lessons that the grandmother oak might teach me. I take the time to sit in the clearing and listen with my not-eye senses.

I scared a lizard off of the little wooden bench under a tree where I stopped just for a moment to take a rest on my way back, drink some water out of my Camelbak, and do a little bit of writing in my passport travel notebook with my Kaweco fountain pen.

Topping the climb up from the creek on the groomed trail and almost to my car, I think about how I could have responded to this feeling of being burnt out and disconnected, kind of at a loss at the end of the school year, by going to the gym, or taking another walk around the block. But instead I grabbed my Camelbak and my writing supplies and my trusty hiking pole and headed into the woods. Because a walk in the woods is restorative in a way that a walk around the block is not. Not just because we’re flexing unusual muscles as we try to clamber over ancient stone and navigate our way through spreading branches and around curves, not just because our eyes can obtain much further vistas than we can when we’re stuck behind our computer screen. A walk in the woods is restorative because it allows us to flex our senses, to put our own heads underground, and feel how we are connected to a broader world of nature. A world that is real and eternal.

Thank you for reading what emerges from my process.

Gwendolyn

I make it a point to clip links of articles that I find so I can look at the end of each week at all the things that I’ve been reading. I noticed that of all the different things that I read this previous week, what stood out was a Guardian book review of a book by Michael Valdovinos, who was an Air Force psychologist who spent time in Afghanistan. I went and actually found the book, called “Moral Injuries: When Good Conscience Suffers in a World of Hurt” and began to read it.

The book is about moral injury. And the point that the Guardian article and Michael make is that moral injury is not unique to war. Although, of course, being ordered to do something that you believe violates your conscience, being forced to do something that you believe violates your conscience because you are a participant in a structure that has the ability to make you do that, like being a member of the military, has a very particular cost. It creates a very particular kind of damage that veterans have to struggle with. But we see this, as Michael points out, in healthcare workers, especially during the COVID pandemic, when they were having to make life and death choices in the face of a system that was not necessarily supporting them in following their conscience.

And educators face their own kind of moral injury, especially educators who are asked to make changes to their curricula in order to satisfy non-educational concerns, or who are asked to spend a huge amount of their time doing paperwork only tangentially related to the life-changing service that they’re there to provide. This has a cost. In the face of this cost, what can I do?

Recognize that I am being pushed to the brink of burnout by the non-educational demands of my role at the moment, of my day job. This is where my creative life can come to the rescue. Every time I leave my textile product construction class, three hours in the evening, an extra class that adds to my time burden, I leave smiling. Not just because I’m helping to prepare future educators to also make a life-changing difference in people’s lives, but also because we were engaged in something that I can now see is actively healing. We aren’t just learning how to make clothes. Making together, the granny hobbies, doing things together, can have an unconscious dimension that allows for companionship. Our hands are doing something that our mind only dimly understands, and our analytical powers are put to the back, and something older, something more raw, something realer, is allowed to emerge. We can eventually get to symbolic content, but quite a lot of what we’re doing when we’re making is older and rawer than that.

And it turns out that this can be a really great place for us to begin to have conversations, as a teacher and future teachers, about our concern about the damage that is being done to the structure of education. And being able to make together softens us to the point where we can begin to gently expose our injury to each other and start to think about how we can repair the injury. This means that my classroom is, in fact, a place of moral repair, not just because I’m teaching students about how to actively do repair. In my couture group, I’m working alongside these students to teach them design research techniques and design thinking. We’re thinking about craftsmanship, we’re talking about sustainability, and most importantly, we’re working on something that is part of my value structure. Reducing waste and building a life that is tailored and customized to my needs, through a rejection of the mass commercialization that has degraded and demeaned my craft. But I’m also helping the students to see how they have the skills to build a life that is based on their values, whatever those values may be.

And we’re doing this work together. I feel, at the end of each week, even though I am frustrated, that helping them is helping me. And here’s the irony that us caring people have when we realize that it’s partly our caring that is causing the damage. We care so much, which is why we put our hand up when we’re asked: is there a volunteer to do this incredibly tedious, annoying, and onerous task that will have almost nothing to do with the reason that you’re here? But we care, and we want to make sure that the system that we’re part of survives. And so caring is what gets me into this position in the first place.

But when I get in the room with the kids, I can feel that caring with them isn’t wrong, and it will not hurt me. I know we’re supposed to put on our own oxygen mask before we help others. But in this case, if I am a teacher, if the reason that I am here is to be a teacher, and the damage that is being done to me is being asked to do a million things with my time that have nothing, nothing, to do with teaching, then getting to spend time actively and viscerally teaching the things that matter to me the most, the making, this can be healing to me. Even though it is still caring. This is the paradox.

The repair is happening within the relationship that I have with my students, not outside of that relationship. I didn’t need a break from teaching to repair the challenges. I needed a break from everything that isn’t teaching.

So yes, as a matter of fact, let me teach more rather than do the paperwork. Of course, my making is this structure that I have set up in my life that allows me to share things with myself first, things that come up deeply into my artwork, and then share them with others. So my Groundwork exhibition, which is coming down this week and will be wrapped up lovingly, several of the pieces sent off to new homes for people who discovered that what spoke to me is true and also spoke to them. A banner carried by members of the military to state their allegiance. My allegiance to something greater than myself. And at the end of the day, I am a teacher. As you think about your own places of hurt, how can making serve to repair not just damaged places in things, but damaged places in people?

Thank you for reading what emerges from my process.

Gwendolyn

In my seasonal mythology, it is the first week of the next season, called Early Summer. Because summer is so long in Central Texas, it makes sense to split it up into two eleven-week seasons and really celebrate the differences between them. Early Summer, when the trees are leafy, the rain has moistened the ground, and the temperature is not yet so hot that we can’t really enjoy the outdoors. The birds. The flowers. And wandering into the heartwood.

This is not a productive season, as much as it is a chance to release the things that I’ve been working on and celebrate with the people in my life.

For that reason, the post today is going to be all about what I’ve been reading. There are several books or articles that I’ve been looking at that all circle around the same problem.

Books and links:

The Score by C. Thi Nguyen - bookshop.org:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-score-how-to-stop-playing-somebody-else-s-game-c-thi-nguyen/10cacf42dab73bd5

The Score - libro.fm: https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9798217163588-the-score

In Defense of Dabbling by Karen Walrond - bookshop.org:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/in-defense-of-dabbling-the-brilliance-of-being-a-total-amateur-karen-walrond/22158836

In Defense of Dabbling - libro.fm: https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9798341905184-in-defense-of-dabbling

Fast Company pieces - Wrong definition of success: https://www.fastcompany.com/91501882/youre-not-burned-out-you-have-the-wrong-definition-of-success Careers aren’t ladders they’re quilts: https://www.fastcompany.com/91486024/careers-arent-ladders-theyre-quilts https://

Stylist - Competence hangover: https://www.stylist.co.uk/life/careers/competence-hangover-signs-explained/1062193

In the book by C. Thi Nguyen called The Score, he talks about the games that we play in capitalism, how we keep track. He’s a game philosopher, and he explores how treating life like a game has its benefits and its drawbacks. His big point has to do with this idea of value capture: when we choose a metric, that metric can end up colonizing something that we love and works to redefine something that matters to us.

An example of this would be when you start tracking the number of steps you take every day. It turns walking into a game, which is great, but then you are suddenly angry that you left your watch upstairs when you were about to take a walk, because it “doesn’t count.”

And then there is a book by Karen Walrond called In Defense of Dabbling. She is talking about keeping your hobby as a hobby. In a word, amateurism. The word amateur used to mean a lover of art. And now it just means you’re not good at it, which is, I don’t know, kind of a terrible indictment of the world that we’re living in.

This brings up the idea of a competence hangover: that the worth of an activity becomes fused with how useful it is, and this allows exhaustion with your everyday life to build up silently and slowly, until suddenly you are stretched out flat. That idea was brought up in the Stylist piece on competence hangovers.

There are also two articles from Fast Company. One about the wrong definition of success, how you can hit every milestone and still feel nothing. And one about careers not being ladders, but being quilts, which obviously the textile idea really appeals to me. You need to be building this checkerboard of skills, rather than trying to reach a certain pinnacle, because there is no safety at the top of the ladder, especially when there is no ladder.

All of these are the same problem, just wearing different clothes.

This brings me to a confession. Painting used to be a hobby. I started painting as a hobby. Then a colleague pointed out that if I took a silk painting workshop and got good at silk painting, it could count as creative scholarship for my work. And yeah, that was a definite choice.

Elevating it to become a serious practice was a choice. And for me, it was the right choice. But it involved actually deciding that I needed a new professional identity, that I was unhappy with my identity as an academic scientist, that I felt academic science has become bankrupt in the U.S. to a certain extent. It has been damaged through its connection with federal grants, which have turned out to be a tool of corruption, and with its connection to the peer review journal system, which turns out to be riddled with falsehood, especially with the introduction of AI. And this unsatisfactory system just isn’t having the impact on the world of sustainability that I’d hoped. Hundreds of thousands of journal articles later, and we still haven’t solved the real problems in life.

Taking what was a hobby and turning it into a serious practice was irreversible. I can’t have that hobby back as a way to relax, even though painting is still very relaxing. It’s now surrounded by hours of admin to keep track of it as a practice. And I know from the inside out what happens when you turn your hobby, whether it’s just the hobby of walking the dog, into something serious. Suddenly, it’s all steps on a counter.

Years ago, I thought, I really enjoy textiles. I enjoy making textiles; why aren’t I designing textiles? It makes perfect sense to have those go with my workshops to make clothes, which is related to my sustainability practice. And as I was designing these textiles, I realized that I had a product opportunity.

I bought a sticker cutter. My wonderful illustrations that I was designing for textiles could be sold to other stationery hobbyists as stickers. I bought the sticker cutter. I took some classes. There’s a whole path to monetization right there.

And I’ve made the decision this season to step back. I’ll probably continue to participate in the online surface design communities because I feel like I have benefited from what I’m learning about the tools. But I’m not going to use this as my new get-rich-quick scheme. Among other things, we are now in this influencer economy where breaking through all the other people who are trying to do the same thing isn’t fun. And I want to keep this as a hobby, something fun. Make stickers for me, make stickers for my sister, make stickers for my friends, but do not make stickers to sell, because it distracts from the real thing that I want to be doing.

Speaking of hobbies, I’m really excited as I put the finishing touches on my plan to go to my first stationery festival. I cannot think of the last time I went to a conference that wasn’t work-related. Because of federal funding cutbacks, my work is no longer paying for me to go to conferences, so unless they’re local and I can drive to them, they are out of reach for me. I haven’t been to a conference in more than a year.

Going off to Little Craft Fest in Houston, I initially thought, oh, I could look around. I could see what the other businesses are like. I could capture data. Suddenly, I’m making it into a job. When I could just go as an amateur. I could enjoy it. I could set a budget, and I could buy some washi tape and enjoy looking at the stickers that other people made.

I am going to plan that as play, because I deserve some play. And this isn’t a reward for having done a good job, for having had good sales, for having completed developing a new workshop, or for giving talks. This is just because I deserve it. And I would have deserved it even if I had done nothing “successful” in my practice at the moment.

Stay tuned for my report on my hobby.

The fragrance that comes from the rain isn’t about production. It’s just about the sheer joy of the trees celebrating that they are being bathed, taking part in this lifecycle system. Play is the point, not the reward.

Thank you for reading what emerges from my process.

Gwendolyn

So, for me, the big revelation, when I first took up watercolor and asked myself (actually, I took up silk painting, and I asked myself) why I was so unhappy with the shades of red that I could create? I had a primary kit. I had cyan, yellow, magenta, and black, and yet, I could never get the oranges. I could never get the browns. I could never get the reds that I wanted. So one of my very first purchases after I purchased that basic kit was a bottle of scarlet red, and then a bottle of poppy red, and then a bottle of apricot. Because it turns out that no matter how I blend those primaries together, I would not get the shade that I wanted. This led me to Bruce MacEvoy’s comprehensive takedown of color theory on his website, handprint.com, for which, if this were a book, I would pay. I would pay a lot for it. Fortunately, it’s just a freely available source. But unlike the free sources I was critiquing earlier, this freely available source is open to reevaluation anytime Bruce encounters additional evidence, including the evidence of his own experiments.

So, in real pigment chemistry, you cannot, you literally cannot mix certain colors. Certain colors occur when the rods and cones in our eyes are excited in a very specific manner, and this has to happen because of certain wavelengths of light that are reflected into our eyes. And no matter how many wavelengths of light a blue and a magenta might reflect, they may never actually reflect a certain wavelength of light that a chromophore that is actually purple can reflect. And in fact, we can see this in the dawn of modern art during the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist period, with the invention in a lab of chemicals that allowed artists to finally paint what they were actually seeing. So the vibrant purples in the shadows, the saturated oranges that optical mixing promises but never actually delivers, these were created by being able to use things like cobalt violet or the phthalo pigments. And, of course, now many of us really treasure the quinacridone pigments as well

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For some of this, I really do blame the institution of modern education that has authority in the art community but doesn’t have a vested interest in working to make sure that the most correct and latest science is being used. University art education can perpetuate these outdated theories, in part because the instructors and the students both receive little instruction or grounding in the science behind the ideas that they’re using. As someone who works in a field that considers itself an applied science, I am often asked, “Well, wait a minute, what is the science behind this?” When I teach my students about dyes or textiles, I am, in fact, teaching them science. But, because some art students aren’t taught the why behind things they’re doing with a scientific basis, they’re just told, “well, these are the rules, and that’s what nature says”, even though, “well, that’s what nature said in the 19th century, but we now know better” is what they should be hearing. Students blame themselves when the theory they were taught doesn’t work with their particular materials. And they develop a kind of personal mythology about things like color they go on to teach their own students.

Of course, it turns out that using a limited palette, choosing your colors carefully, not using every single tube of paint available, does create a beautiful and cohesive artwork that is striking for its own reasons, for reasons of internal logic. But this reason is not because the artist mixed all of their greens from yellow and blue pigments, when, in fact, it is possible to find recently invented/discovered green pigments that are more natural than anything that we can create by mixing the blues and the yellows together. This about this for a minute, because nature, in fact, uses chemicals that are actually green when it shows us the green that we see in the world. It is not making those chemicals using blue pigments and yellow pigments. It’s making those chemicals using chlorophyll, which is actually green. So, here is a very expensive education that is just plain outdated.

Being able to think through how we can update our knowledge and understanding in art, using new materials to reflect on whether the older materials may lack proper attribution, may have appropriated ideas wholesale from sources in other languages, and making sure that there are corrections that are possible, such as provided by the living resource that MacEvoy’s handprint provides.

Thank you for reading what emerges from my process.

Gwendolyn

The other week, I was excited to find Lewis F. Day’s “Pattern Design: A Book for Students” free in my Kobo Plus account. Who doesn’t love a free book? Of course, the appeal of this book, for someone who is studying textile design, is that it’s a beautiful historical source, and it’s completely accessible because it’s out of copyright. There are a variety of versions, each of which are structured slightly differently and which lose some, but only a bit, of the original structure of the book in the translation to an ebook.

As I was flipping through it and reading, in some cases, the very concise, in other cases, the almost confusing descriptions of the ways in which weavers (mostly) plan their textile designs, I realized something. Many of the newer art education books I had to pay money for did something that Day’s book can’t really do. They explain the sources of the designs. They credit those sources, and then teach the thinking behind the patterns that goes further back than just the appropriation of the designs by the textile industry.

This made me consider what I want to say to about public domain art education books, which are a wonderful resource. But they pale in comparison to some of the better modern resources that reevaluate the very same sources that these older public domain art books used. Modern books provide a clearer picture of the actual source of the designs, and, in some cases, challenge outdated science or outdated thinking behind the meaning of the designs.

When “Free” Crowds Out “Better”

This is the heart of the issue: free can sometimes make better difficult to determine. I thought about whether I could find a few examples of this for you.

The book I thought of when I read Lewis Day’s “Pattern Design” book was a newer book called “Biomorphic Islamic Design” by Esra Alhamal. The author has a class on Domestika as well. This author carefully explains the mathematics behind the tessellation of the patterns and then gives us hands-on activities to complete while reading. Day’s book shows you beautiful patterns extracted from Islamic sources, but Alhamal teaches you the geometric thinking that created them in the first place. You’re learning the why, not just copying the what.

Early in my art self-education, I was excited to find Arthur Wesley Dow’s “Composition” book online for a dollar or even free through Amazon Kindle Unlimited. I knew that Dow was a teacher of Georgia O’Keeffe’s, a major American painter I respect. Looking through the book recently, I can see now that Dow did major appropriation of Japanese aesthetics without providing clear context. More recently written books, such as Wucius Wong’s “Principles of Form and Design,” take a more systematic approach based on how students actually learn the topic of form. As an independent student, using these later resources means that I have a tool that can actually be more clearly applied to my work, and this makes it worth the money.

Another example that I came across was Andrew Loomis’s figure drawing books from the ‘40s and ‘50s, in comparison with a book by Michael Hampton called “Figure Drawing: Design and Invention” from 2009 (YouTube book review). This area of figure drawing isn’t actually of interest to me, but it might be of interest to you. [And you can see the links to Loomis’s works here.] Hampton thinks through what challenges students, because classical or idealized proportions appropriated from Renaissance sources don’t actually teach movement and balance. And it means that as a learner, Hampton’s book ends up being a resource that won’t waste as much of your time.

This pattern repeats across art education. Over the next few years, many more valuable art education resources from the early 20th century will become available as their copyrights expire. Just because they’re free doesn’t mean that they don’t end up costing. In this case, costing in time and confusion.

A Way Forward

I would say, love the old books, treasure them. Appreciate the fact that you found them easily for free, and that they gave you some ideas. But then from there, go ahead and use some of the newer tools we have at our fingertips.

I teach my students how to use Perplexity, which is a powerful search engine tool that uses an LLM model to guide the search language of the students in order to ask questions about the sources that we’re using. A question that led me to this article was: I really like the stuff that’s shared in Dow’s book, but I find it a little bit confusing. I’m wondering if some of his sources might have explained it better, but weren’t translated into English.

Just because we have easy access to all of these materials, and even greater access now that we live in the age of AI, we should not just accept outdated or, frankly, harmful frameworks around the materials that we use. And this is where modern educators can really shine. In a world where information is free, where information is gushing out of fire hoses all around us, helping students understand how to evaluate that information is more important than ever. This is the work of modern educators, both science and art educators.

I would like for you to consider what resources you really enjoyed that are free, that you might now become curious about and wonder: Is there a really good version published more recently by a modern educator who took the time to think through how people learn? Or who took the time to think through the needs of modern artists? Or who took the time to think through the updated science, both our understanding of how physics works and the availability of new materials that were not available when these books were written?

Finally, consider works by modern educators that actually take pains to correctly attribute the sources of materials when previously sources that were not in English were simply treated as free for the taking.

Take some time to look at your free things and ask yourself: wouldn’t it be better, just a little bit better, if I paid for a more modern version of this?

The truth is, I’m not breaking up with free art books entirely. I’m just insisting on a more mature relationship with them. One where I recognize their limitations, seek out the sources they borrowed from, and invest in contemporary educators who are doing the corrective work of proper attribution, updated pedagogy, and ethical scholarship.

Thank you for reading what emerges from my process.

Gwendolyn

My day job is teaching fashion history, textile science, and sewing education at Texas State University. I genuinely love it, and not just because a steady paycheck protects my ability to make art without chasing commissions. My colleagues are thoughtful, my students keep me honest, and the work of teaching feeds my practice in ways I know I don’t want to give up. I’m one of the lucky ones.

Right now, though, that day job is asking a lot. Higher education in Texas is in the middle of a large-scale, state-mandated curriculum documentation and revision project with a very compressed timeline. As senior faculty, a significant portion of that work lands on me, on top of a full teaching load and active creative scholarship. It’s a lot.

Here’s what I keep thinking about: this kind of sweeping, rapid institutional change would have been logistically impossible to mandate even five years ago. The expectation that universities can document, revise, and report on entire curricula in a matter of weeks is itself a product of the AI moment. The tools exist now to generate frameworks, draft language, and process documentation at scale, so the assumption follows that the humans on the receiving end can absorb and execute at that same pace. We can’t, quite. The bottleneck, as always, is human judgment, human care, and the irreplaceable work of faculty who actually know what they’re teaching and why.

That gap between what AI makes possible to demand and what people can actually sustain is something I think about a lot, both in my own practice and in my classroom. It’s worth sitting with.

I’ll be back next week. In the meantime, I’m grateful for this community and looking forward to returning to it.

Thank you for reading what emerges from my process

Gwendolyn

I teach a class called History of Fashion, and I am happy that the class uses as a text…a book. And I’m not being sarcastic here. It is an actual physical book by Elizabeth Weyland Barber (2024) called *Women’s Work: the First 20,000 Years* that the bookstore has to buy (that you can buy from a bookstore here), and the students have to go over and pick up, and then they can hold it in their hands.

I designed my version of this History of Fashion course, from the beginning when I took it over two years ago, to be an “AI yes” course. I recognized that there was no way for me to really stop the students from using AI to write their history essays. And so, asking for a research essay about history in that class would just put them in the position of having to lie to me and put me in the position of having to grade very tedious papers that have little creativity or joy in them because the students are just not very good yet at how to prompt AI.

I am definitely an AI early adopter who uses AI to do many routine, mundane tasks in my life that I honestly don’t have time for. And I know that we’ve all been using AI for a long time for things like autocomplete and spell check. And so, I do not take AI lightly. I am not taking a position of “AI bad,” I just want to talk today about why I teach sewing in the age of AI.

As I taught this class, I noticed quite a lot of other markers that say that analog is a direction that young people are really reaching for. Besides this, there are some other trends related to granny hobbies, which is a turn to analog, but I think also reflects the very real sensory relaxation aspect that you can get from doing things like knitting and sewing. And people are really interested in actual cameras that use film, and they want to talk about the process that they used to develop their film, in part in recognition that photographs they see on the internet don’t really capture the truth of their lives anymore.

I think these trends, including a trend called “joy spanning,” where people are trying to make their homes more joyful (kind of the hygge trend, only a little more yellow as opposed to beige) these are all actually not separate things. They’re part of a deeper cultural shift. An article in the 2026 issue of Ideal Home by Kezia Reynolds defines joyspanning as “the art of prioritising our happiness and wellbeing throughout our lifespan”. I believe one reason I am here, in the lives of my students, is to teach them joyspanning, to show them how things I learned when I was their age, or younger, provide happiness and well-being at my advanced (54) age.

Here I am in my “AI yes” class, and I want to make sure that I can communicate the point. Someone could ask me, “Why are you asking the students in an ‘AI yes’ class to learn embroidery? What’s the point?” I think, “What’s the point? “ Is the bigger question. What’s the point of education now that you can just ask Perplexity to give you the answers to almost anything?

But when I’m sitting in this classroom with the students, I can tell absolutely exactly what college is for. College is for helping them develop into full-blown, capable adults out of the shadow of their families in order to prepare them to begin lives of their own. Among many other things that college does, college also allows the students to spend a precious three hours a week in the room with me, an expert about something that I am deeply passionate about, and that, it turns out, they are passionate about as well.

While we face this sense that there’s some sort of existential crisis in higher education, I think that there is a role for allowing young people time with domain experts, including time watching them use AI. I am in an area that has material knowledge and I know other professors are not in areas that have material knowledge. I can’t address their particular crisis. But I can address my own. I picked an area like sewing, that I’m a deep domain expert in, because I want to show them they can ask AI to give them the plan for how to do something related to textiles and be fed quite a melange of sort of beige garbage.

I am teaching sewing in the age of AI because I want to show the students the part of the work that we do as fashion professionals that the AI cannot replicate. We can ask for a plan to embroider an example of a Tudor rose and be show a design the image generator working with the LLM believes is what we want but what they’re being asked to do is actually not physically possible to sew, because I’ve actually tried it. I want them to engage deeply with the materials that our world is made out of in order to understand it. At some point, will we get to a world model where the AI understands the inside of a yarn? Will it model the fibers that it’s made up of so deeply that it can plan out an embroidery design in a way that is actually successful for a machine or a human to make? Can it successfully replicate the historical sources that we’re looking at? It’s very possible. But we won’t get to that point if we don’t have deep domain experts who can help us get there.

This tactile intelligence, being able to touch something, being able to troubleshoot the sewing machine when it can’t quite do its job…this is all very important. But, of course, there’s another reason. I am not teaching at the university in order to help kids get jobs. They could go to professional school, the business schools of old, to do that, right? No, I’m teaching students at a university because I want them to become complete and well-rounded, curious, and passionate about knowledge kind of human beings, because I want to see more people like me in the world. And to do that, I have to teach them the joy that comes from acquiring knowledge.

Yeah, a lot of my knowledge came from reading books, okay? But a lot of my knowledge came from making, and there’s joy in the making. This joy spanning that we were talking about applies to the craft. I am also really excited to be teaching sewing in the age of AI because I know that textiles, fashion history, women’s history, material culture, these topics are areas that are given small attention in traditional textbooks.

I want to use AI to take my students to places that I just can’t go without it. We can’t explore the textile culture of Central Asia, not with the library that I have access to, without a tool like this that lets us ask bunches of questions and quickly and effectively search all the different digital repositories all around the world to find the photos that we’re looking for.

So I teach sewing in the age of AI because it is something that is part of our real life, that we are all touching every day, and that it is important that we understand. I also teach sewing in the age of AI because my personal creative practice ultimately flows to and from sewing and I don’t want to be alone in the joy I take from this.

Our students are all hungry for joyspanning. They want meaning over the mindless efficiency that they’re being promised in their careers. But they also want meaning for the lives of joy they were born to live. And so when I teach Fashion History, or I teach textile arts, when I provide sewing instruction, I’m not just opening some ancient ark and showing them some relic inside. I’m actually opening a door on what it means to be human and asking them to really reach out hands and touch, to look at the pictures of grave goods and see the bone needle and imagine the lives of the ancient Paleolithic people and how they were attempting to solve their everyday material culture problems. How they also lived lives of joy because they could sew!

Researching bees, however, I discovered that the individual bee that we call the Queen is anything but. We picture her with a little crown and a black and gold honeycomb robe with a dripping train, but we only call this largest of all bees in the hive the “queen” because we need hierarchy. The “queen” isn’t in charge of anything, she is basically a reproductive organ for the hive. The “queen” doesn’t make plans, that is a function of the hive mind, a disembodied intelligence created by synergy between all the bees in the hive, not executive function. This made me think of the illusion that “we” have that there is a “me” in charge of our mind, an executive that makes decisions. But this isn’t the case, so much of how “we” work in down to synergy between our conscious mind, the gut microbiome pumping molecules into our system, muscle memory and even the collective unconscious. That sound we hear, buzzing about our New Year’s Resolutions, it isn’t a CEO, it’s just one bee buzzing. What a comfort but also, what a dilemma.

I see this as “the pressure chamber problem”. I have spent all winter filling my creative aquifer, building the pressure, but I can’t just wave my scepter and “release the hounds”. Willpower can’t force the creative gush I am depending on. How do you squeeze rock? I can’t force creativity, but I can tempt it through the narrow channels, priming the pump so to speak, laying the creative trail. Water under pressure finds release through temperature shifts, natural weakness in the rock and seismic movements, rumbles in the gut of the earth. But I can pull water from my aquifer by seduction, laying a small trail of water to pull the creativity forth.

I like to think of this as “seducing” spring. On my altar of the season, I have a bottle of native honey and with care for the temptation it may provide to inappropriate creatures, I will leave an offering of honey for the Bee Goddess, returning the transformed fruit of bee labor as a gift. In the case of my art, the seduction is something like the “artist’s date”, from Julia Cameron “the Artist’s Way”. An artist’s date is doing something to feed your art, to seduce your creativity, it isn’t just self-care, it’s an actual courtship. Artists should make Valentine’s Day a Holy Day to celebrate the moment that we fell in love with our practice.

To seduce spring, I bring out the silk scarves and concentrate on the sensory details of my own hive mind, the fresh mint scent, the warm flush of baby chick yellow, the flavor of honey. The whole world is coated in creative pollen, I can just wiggle my way through and drink it up. I can be the flowers I want to see in the world. Flowers don’t track habits or set quarterly goals, they are open when conditions are right and they offer their beauty freely, trusting that the bees, the pollinators will come. My hive-body wants to move towards the creative nector, I just need to let myself be seduced.

The sudden flush of calls for art, the dizzying list of opening receptions, its a garden, ready for us to buzz in and share our waggle dance. The business of bees is reciprocity, not extraction, the Power of the Bee Goddess is to accept what we are already desperate to share. Forget the to-do list, just follow what smells so sweet right back to the spring.

Thank you for reading what emerges from my process.

Gwendolyn

Every morning I pour water into a blue and yellow porcelain bowl and I say an invocation to the Edwards Aquifer. I acknowledge that the Edwards Aquifer is the underground heart of the place where I am standing. I acknowledge that the water I receive from the aquifer is what sustains both my body and serves as the source of my artistic inspiration in the form of the San Marcos River. And finally, I pledge that I will tend the mystery of the aquifer.

Today I’m in the last stages of preparing an exhibition at the Meadow Center for Water and the Environment. Towards the end of my exhibition there will be an Earth Day celebration hosted at the Meadow Center for Water and the Environment, and I’ll be giving a book talk about the book that accompanies my 15 banner series focused on my imagined visualization of the world inside the aquifer. This sacred spot has been recognized as such by many people across many traditions. During the Earth Day celebration, First People, Native Americans, will be coming to perform sacred dances and a blessing of the water. In other times we have had blessings by Buddhist monks, for example. I have done this type of sacred observance myself, attending baptisms with friends in the river a bit further down in the public park. And because I sprinkled some of the ashes of my mother into the river, it is for me a sacred place.

The opening of the exhibition on February 8th at Spring Hall from 1:30-3:30pm is coming up quickly, and because of predicted bad weather this weekend, it’s even more important that I get this little bit of work done. I can feel the burgeoning lift of creative energy as I move from the time of rest provided by winter into the time of activity created by spring. This exhibition is the first gush from the pressure chamber of artistic rest I created during the winter. My energy is breaking the surface as I create all kinds of additional interpretive material to include with the exhibition.

In my visualization of the aquifer, I like to picture the sorts of springs we’re told existed in Spring Lake prior to the damming of the water to create the lake. The pressure created a geyser that could be seen for miles around. I heard the number 35 miles one time, and I think that got conflated with the fact that it may be 30,000 years that we have evidence of human habitation at the location. I’m not sure where we would have gotten 35 miles, but gosh, it does make quite the visual to think of the water spurting out of the rock with such force, dramatically announcing that this is the location, this is the spot. And it makes sense that in many ways this very spot should be, or would be considered, sacred.

The banners that I make are reminiscent of the kind of banners that were carried by traveling people, warriors, or were used to decorate the insides of churches. The way that the fabric moves in the light inside of a tall building, and also the way that the fabric can be stored easily, allowing for the many changes of dressing of a sacred place, really convinces me that while we don’t have the remains of these kinds of banners, we know that they must have been important and special objects anytime human beings develop the capability to produce objects of this quality.

So hanging my banners inside Spring Hall at the Meadow Center, the early 20th century hotel that is now a research and interpretation facility where visitors, mainly by groups of school children, can peer through glass-bottomed boats directly at the aquifer below. Hanging my banners in this location is as close as I can get to the most sacred place in my artistic mythology. I’m very excited and honored, and it all feels a bit of a rush now, but as soon as everything’s installed and I have a chance to step back and look and see, I know that I will be flooded by inspiration as I consider what other things I can do to honor the aquifer that is the source of both my sustenance and my artistic inspiration.

I invite you to attend my opening on February 8th. If that doesn’t work for you, I invite you to make plans to come to the Meadow Center during the spring of 2026 to see the Groundwork banners, now what I would consider the heart of my artistic universe.

Thank you for reading what emerges from my process.

Gwendolyn

This is the deepest point of the aquifer that I travel in my imagination. This seasonal focus on the deep underground will be followed shortly by the change of focus for Spring, when we will be squirted from the deep levels of the aquifer up to the surface of our attention, and share our creative work. I am excited when I think about the benefits of this kind of pressure that allows me to manifest my creative activities. But I wanted to differentiate for myself the difference between the cultural pressures that we feel in January that are, as I imagine it, swirling above me, that I have chosen to stay beneath. These might be things like goals, or fresh starts, or making annual plans, or creating yearly summaries. All of these are about releasing pressure in order to make plans or draw vision boards or manifest accomplishments. And, even though it is the first week of January, I want to stay down here, down in the underground, in the subsurface for longer to soak up the yummy warmth of my creative furnace and wait until it is spring to burst out.

For this reason, I actually set my goals for my year back in November so that I could arrive in this season of internal reflection, of coziness, of unusual schedules, with my goals already in place and allow them to marinate with me while I was taking this rest. Because of the work that I did in late fall and early winter, I am now in a position of rest. But it is different rest than resting on my back, with my arms behind my head in a summer meadow. This is resting within a crystalline cavern. This is resting like a seed below the ground, full of potential. And this made me think about pressure.

I think of this deepest winter place as the pressure chamber. In the science of aquifers, this pressure chamber in the aquifer creates the hydraulic difference in the layers of rock that allows springs to burst forth with such surprise and vigor out of the rock. In Central Texas, the miles of limestone hills behind us here to the west gather rainwater over a vast area. The rain soaks the ground, but because the channels and layers of the limestone are the only portion that’s so porous as to accept the water, and the other rock pushes the water aside, all of that water is channeled down and down and essentially forced into a smaller area until it eventually reaches a place, miles away, where it can escape. So the water draining down from the enormous catchment area, the “recharge zone” as the signs remind us, is accumulated under increasing pressure.

When water in these porous layers of rock reaches the edge of the limestone hills, it might find a spot where there is a small fissure or channel that it can follow back up to the surface, such as the spring here in San Marcos. We are told historically that the pressure of this spring, after a significant rain event in the Hill Country had refilled the aquifer with a huge accumulation of water, was so intense that the geyser, coming up out of the spring could be seen for miles around. I like to imagine this geyser as a huge and beneficent Kama, a nature spirit, calling out to the thirsty and making this particular spring a place of gathering, and a significant landmark even in prehistoric times. The size of this spirit is related to the amount of pressure that builds up, itself an expression of the size of the recharge zone filling the aquifer. It’s the sheer colossus of the limestone that is behind us that creates the force for this spring. The more area that collects the water, the more the pressure builds. This pressure is a good thing.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that we call the season when we see the first signs of life after a winter soaks the ground with snow or rain “spring”. But in order to create pressure, the aquifer needs a recharge. The water has to actually back up and sink deep in order to build the force. We can’t have the spring flowing without the accumulation of the water, without the rest of winter. Your creativity can’t burst forth in a beautiful expression, such as the spring provides, without the accumulation of the winter rains. Without the time that it takes for your creative thoughts and ideas to percolate.

This is why I think that letting off the pressure by sharing all of your thoughts and ideas right now is NOT a good idea. Wait just a bit until your winter season is really over and you are ready for the explosive energy of spring. By letting everybody peek at what you’re doing, just because it’s January, and you’re feeling a different pressure, peer pressure, to share, you are just reducing the amount of creative “material” that there is in your recharge zone, you are letting off some of the pressure. So, it can seem like, when you’re letting your thoughts percolate, which percolation is such an aquifer word, that you are not doing anything, but in fact, you are allowing the creative recharge to build.

Saying, “I need to keep up the pressure of rest” sounds a bit silly, but in my personal life I know that pressure can be a good thing. Who doesn’t love the comforting pressure of a warm hug, a solid squeeze. That’s why we sell these weighted blankets, because they create this feeling of safety. I love swimming in the pool because the water instantly creates all-over body compression that supports the flow of the circulation of the lymph and the other fluids along the surface of my skin. We have discovered that these are incredibly important. So we may think when we say, “Oh, I’m under pressure”, or “There’s a great amount of pressure”, that this is a negative thing. And yet, because we admire grace under pressure, we know how tremendous the results of a bit of pressure can be. I really think it’s important to distinguish between this kind of helpful internal pressure that creates pumping and how we should allow this pressure to exist.

Feeling the deep pressure in the winter of all of these ideas, all of these thoughts, all of these hopes and dreams feels good. Knowing that I will not feel pressured to perform a whole bunch of resolutions and a post a whole bunch of goals and plans actually relieves stress. I already know what I’m gonna be doing for this spring. I’m allowing those to press against each other, and to refine. So, this time in the winter, this feeling of pressure isn’t something to escape, not yet. It’s necessary. Without this compression, there isn’t any force that could be pushing me to emerge. So, even though I can feel like, you know, “Oh, I haven’t done the goals section yet” or “I haven’t stated my plans but everybody else is busy sharing”, I can remind myself, I’m not stuck. I’m not trapped here underground with my thoughts. I’m allowing the pressure to build.

I want to wrap up this brief entry because I really am mostly trying to rest this time of year by explaining that it is a good time to, in fact, embrace the pause. The pause is just the pressure building, and this pressure is necessary. It’s natural, it’s supportive. I encourage you to trust your seasonal timing. I’ve done the thinking, that this timing works for me. Later, at the very end of January or in early February, is the time that I need to reveal and share. And even though it feels like nothing is happening at the moment, I know, as I look around me, at the fruits of my time, in this winter period of deep contemplation, that I can see, I will have so much to share. So, the spring, the spring will come, not the season, the actual force of water gushing from the ground, when I have built enough force, and I will build that force by staying deep, by allowing myself to stay deep, by not judging that my not sharing means I have nothing to share, instead judging that my not sharing is because I’m allowing what I want to share to be shaped by the pressure chamber.

Thank you for reading what emerges from my process.

Gwendolyn

Small town America is blessed with so many little libraries in part because of the generosity of the industrial magnate Andrew Carnegie. I frankly can’t remember what his industry was, but like many people we know him from his name above the entry of the iconically designed red brick libraries he built around the world in the early 20^th century, over 2000 in American towns alone. I just asked the librarian about this and she is looking at the list of Carnegie libraries in Nebraska. Each county seat for the wide swath of our region has or had a Carnegie library, so Geneva, 10 miles down the road still has original library built by Carnegie with an addition on the back. While the Art Deco font carved in stone over the door proclaims “Public Library” it is the huge Capital “C” above the words that marks this building part of Carnegie’s gift.

But, while the small town library has my undying love, the university library also holds a special place in my heart. For my first solo trip down to the “big city” of Lincoln, the capital of the state and home to the University of Nebraska, I made a trip to the library my top priority. Visiting the Love Library on the University of Nebraska main campus was a little bit surreal. I haven’t been back there since I graduated from college more than, well, let’s say 23 years ago. The last time I was there, it was definitely before the trend of turning university libraries into information hubs, as opposed to places to store books. I went in through a door that never used to be open and wandered through the freshly painted and remodeled ground floor, looking for anything familiar. I eventually found and chatted with the librarian, sitting at a computer console in the “ask us area” (gone is the imposing circulation desk), and found out from her that the best I could do for looking at very old books would be in the basement of the north side. Because all of the rest of the books are in the repository, and can be accessed by request, but are not available to be browsed.

It makes sense. The library is prime real estate on campus, and it used to be that students looked for information in books. Now, they can look for information in their Perplexity browsers. And so, I went down to the basement on the north side, and found some wonderful collections of old magazines, which were full of beautiful pictures, and I used my Adobe Capture tool to gather some 1915, 1916 color trends, which was a lot of fun. After an hour with the oldest books I could find, a stop by Gomez Art Supply and a couple of hours internet at The Mill in Lincoln’s Haymarket, I headed back to the interstate, driving the hour back to Fairmont in time to greet the librarian as she closed up shop for the day, promising to stop by the next time she was open.

The public library here in the little town of Fairmont, where I spend most of the time during my vacation, is a tiny but classic small town library, with a great assortment of romances, and mysteries, and kids movies, and all of the magazines you can imagine related to quilting, woodworking, homesteading, home decor, and baking. Speaking of baking, you can even actually check out molded cake pans that can be used to make character cakes in the most popular of the latest characters. That’s the kind of thing that, I think, does make a library very useful.

When I stopped by the first day that we arrived, the librarian was busy assembling the woodcut snowmen that were going to be the focus of the adult craft evening that they have once a week. She does a book related craft with children on Saturdays during the school year, but during the winter break, they didn’t have one planned. And, of course, in my library in San Marcos, they have a maker space, and they have sewing machines in the maker space.

My aunt, Holly, was a state librarian for the State of Nevada. The summer that I spent with her I joined her on a tour of almost all the small town libraries in the state. Her job was to visit each library, check on resources and training needs and be the friendly face of the taxpayer support for this vital rural lifeline. That particular summer, she was back on the road after suffering a serious accident due to falling asleep at the wheel and everyone seemed to think that having me in the front seat, “chattering like a monkey” and keeping an eye on her would ease the burden of long days on the road. I got to see lots of libraries and talk lots of books with my favorite people at that age…adults. I know that in a just parallel, not even another version of my life, I also would have been, or may still yet be a librarian.

The “camping” experience that we have in our little 100-year-old cottage, that doesn’t get internet, and is really pretty much just the way that it was left when the widow who owned it died in the ‘50s, it would not be the same experience if I wasn’t just a short, two block walk from a small town library.

I have to say that, of all of the different amenities that are required to make a community livable, a library is tops. I get it, sidewalks are important. It is a bit frustrating to stumble over broken sidewalks or have to walk out into the street because a new home reno has decided to dispense with the sidewalk altogether. And having a walkable town is all the rage. But I think that the absolute first metric, for me, of a livable community will be whether or not there is a public library.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Thank you for reading what emerges from my process.

Gwendolyn

The theme for my post today is very much rooted in the season of winter, which, for me, is a time of deep rest and creative contemplation, where I try to set aside time to examine the underlying sources of my vision, including nature and the relationships in my life. And I decided that I would write today about the idea of packing for a midwinter picnic. Midsummer picnic, of course, is a very popular idea, because you see pictures of young people in fancy dress, drowsing on blankets by the lake, in French paintings, but a midwinter feast. That’s what you pack in your backpack before you strap on your skis and head deep into the forest, to settle down on a rock, and watch some rabbits.

Packing this picnic basket is important to me because I’m about to head to our little old house in Nebraska, which is off grid. It has electricity, but we don’t have internet there, and the cell phone reception is very poor. So I really can think of it almost like my own little forest clearing where I can contemplate undisturbed.

I like to think about my approach to consumption. It’s an anti-consumption, it’s practical consumption. When am I going to use this thing that I’m buying? I’m not just buying it for the hit now. I can use it some other time. And this makes me think of this fat bear metaphor, right? Grazing all summer on those berries, dragging salmon out of the stream. This consumption is all with the intention of living out a happy winter in my “hibernation den”. So I’ve been spending all year making small and occasional purchases with the specific intention of packing my basket for this midwinter feast.

I very much enjoy this thoughtful or practical approach to consumption, which has meant that I’m not in any kind of frantic, last-minute buying to prepare for a trip kind of position. Of course, it’s in part because I’ve done the trip many times. But in part, it’s because I have been thinking ahead.

I have been loading up my Boox Palma, which is my Kindle alternative. I really prefer to use book delivery systems that allow me to own the books. This is one reason that I like Kobo, because without any fuss at all, a book that I purchased directly from an author, such as books by Joanna Penn, one of my favorite authors on writing, I can have delivered directly to the Kobo app and read them there. Kindle does not make it so easy to read non-Amazon books in. My Boox Palma is essentially an E Ink Android tablet, and so one little task I’ve been doing the first couple weeks of winter is ensuring that my Boox Palma has all of the different books that I’m looking forward to reading.

Of course, if I’m going to enjoy the main course of my delicious midwinter feast, which is The Secret Commonwealth, the last in the Book of Dust trilogy by Philip Pullman, then I need to reread the first two in the series. And so I have made sure that those are packed in both audio and digital form.

I won’t be borrowing any books from my library in San Marcos, except on my Libby app. Having libraries in two places, Nebraska and Texas, means that I have twice the Libby librarians thinking of me when they select books for availability in the Libby app. And so I will be selecting and downloading some books and looking forward to stopping by the library for the fancy high speed internet, which, to everybody else in the world, is just regular internet, in order to get access to refreshes on my books.

I am looking forward to browsing the small library, which is down the street from our little 100-year-old house, and the library is the source of truth in town, mainly because it’s the one place where the fiber internet has reached, and it means that you can get access to the internet faster than on the dial-up. The librarian is kind, and although she has to cater to a large and happy horde of children in the town, as well as serious romance novel readers, and Western history buffs, she is absolutely open to keeping a special client like me in mind. And so I look forward to browsing through what I might find there.

Gathering content ahead of time means that I’m less tempted to do kind of the endless browsing. What I have is what I have, and I picked it for myself for a reason. So I can really settle in and enjoy. I think an example of that is a book by John Cowper Powys, called Porius, which I have tried to read again several times and have never quite managed. The first time I read it, my library purchased it. It was mind blowing, so amazing. I just had such an amazing experience with that book. I wanted to relive that experience, but for whatever reason, could just never get past the scene where the main character, Porius, is sleeping in the tent with the sister of—not sleeping, but hanging out in the tent with the sister of Merlin and her attendants. And I’ve just never been able to get past that into some of the exciting battle scenes and other things that I know the book promises. So, maybe, if I pack that in my midwinter basket, I can get myself to use that.

I have some art supplies, stamps specifically, and some junk journaling materials that I have accumulated over the year that I have not actually had time to use. Wouldn’t this be the perfect time? And I can have the satisfaction of knowing that my past self was thinking kindly of my winter self in making that particular purchase.

For my art supplies, I’m very excited that I saved up and purchased as a Christmas gift for myself the Zig Clean Color Real Brush pens. These were recommended during a workshop that I heard about these during a virtual painting workshop with “teaching duo” Jennifer Orkin Lewis (@augustwren) and Gayle Kabaker (@gaylekabaker) last July, and I have been purchasing one or two different kinds of brush pens at a time in order to explore. I love watercolor. Don’t get me wrong. But there are just times when it is inconvenient to whip out your little, tiny palette and your little, tiny brush pan and go to town with the watercolor, in part because you can’t just cap your palette closed and expect that you’re not gonna have a little painty mess inside if you have to stop suddenly. So, the brush pens seem to me like a great sort of “jot on the go” kind of option that I could transition into my Galen A5 expandable folio. But, of course, there’s a difference between having supplies and actually figuring out what they can do.

So I have bunches of washi sticker paper in the form of off-cuts and I will be painting my own little washi paper stickers. I’ve been working on a motif a day challenge for my own kind of little advent calendar using trend forecasted motifs. And so, I’ve really been enjoying things I don’t normally draw, like antique kittens and puffy cushions that are forecasted as popular motifs. And so, I will love testing out some of my new art supplies with those materials.

Another thing that I have packed into my midwinter feast picnic basket are episodes of podcasts. Videos are more challenging, because although I love the Play app as a way to save YouTube content to watch later on all of my Apple devices, including Apple TV, you can’t download those, and in a place without data, you have to plan ahead. So, I have downloaded all of the various movies and show episodes that I purchased through to year to enjoy during my midwinter feast. I have a whole season of Babylon 5 that I need to finish, for example. And, of course, the Christmas classics that we enjoy every year. We do plan ahead and purchase different things to watch on DVD. There are some shows, such as the original Roy Marsden version of the Richard Jury detective series that just aren’t available streaming anywhere. Those I already packed and took to our little house a while ago, but it will be fun to revisit some of the things that we stocked away in our little “root cellar” there.

The crazy frenzy of holiday consumption needs to be balanced with a time where you can actually sit back and digest what you’ve taken on board. I think the metaphor, or the philosophy that I like to focus on, is eating what you kill, right? Growing up in the Colorado mountains we lived on game and my mom had a rule. My dad had to eat what he shot. The only exception was for bears and raccoons. Although I’ve heard from people that she may have been mistaken about the bears, my dad has reported she was definitely mistaken about the porcupine. He should not have had to eat that.

However, if you’re gonna buy something, then you need to make time and space in your life to actually use it. The richness, the feeling of being wealthy, doesn’t come from looking at your bottles and bottles of ink, right? The feeling of being wealthy comes from watching the ink spread across the page, from the constant use, from the digestion, rather than merely the hunt, and the acquisition.

So, no Amazon deliveries, no new purchases, working within the constraints of a digital-free zone. This post was written prior to my arrival, and will be uploaded before I even get to Nebraska. I’ll make a post in a couple of weeks, which will be predominantly thoughts and photos, and I will drive to the nearby town and upload it from there.

What happens when you stop buying, right? When you can actually consume what you have, and or make what you intend to consume. This can feed my own creative production, the time that I spend digesting all of the different ideas or sources, going through my DEVONthink folders, and finding everything that I have made available offline to think through why I collected these things, looking back through sketchbooks, making notes, right? This digestion phase is incredibly important.

A small town winter, that really is a wonderful way to enjoy the best that life has to offer. I know many people think of a big city as the chance to have everything at your fingertips, but having everything at your fingertips that you chose yourself, being the curator of your experience, that’s the benefit of this little winter den.

In my personal aquifer cosmology, the season of winter begins at the end of November, and so includes the month of December, and then part of January, when here in Texas, spring will actually begin. And during this time, I like to think of myself as going down into my creative labyrinth and letting my mind go soft, and embracing the darkness of the midwinter season, and really allowing that rest for my eyes to let me see with a clearer vision what might be coming in the year ahead.

So I invite you to pack your own midwinter feast. Look around at what you’ve already gathered, all the things that you purchased this year. Is there something, a book that you’ve been saving to savor? Are there art supplies? A method that you’ve been waiting to try? What could you actually feast on at this moment without buying anything? Stop. Don’t buy anything else. What could you actually make or do right now that would be so satisfying? When the spring comes, you will be replete from your feasting on all of your acquisitions. And so let’s think of this time for deep work as the time when we look at what we already have and the time when we celebrate the wealth of our lives as they are.

Thank you for reading what emerges from my process.

Gwendolyn

Today’s blog post is the last one in the autumn season in my personal seasonal system. I developed this seasonal system, in part, because of my recognition that the traditional definition and behavior related to summer and winter did not reflect the reality of my life. This was mostly related to the temperature and the time spent indoors versus outdoors compared to people who live in a much cooler climate. But I can see now that there is another aspect to my feelings about the season of winter that has driven my quest for a redefinition of what winter means to me.

Autumn is naturally a season of harvest in nature, and this season of harvest leads to winter that, in our society, is now a frenzy of consumption. And this is very disconnected from the true nature of winter in nature, and in my own personal seasonal thinking. I’ve experienced winter as a wonderful time, when I can spend time, because of my work role as an academic, that provides me with three or four weeks of quiet, uninterrupted time that I can use for intense creative activity. That is very different from many people’s experience of winter, which is completely focused on the shopping and the events and the consumption.

I am fortunate in that this year, the San Marcos Art League Holiday Art Market is the last day of my season of Autumn (my Winter begins on November 30^th). I have been focusing on helping other people prepare for their season of consumption, a bit odd, as I think about my own relationship to the repulsion that I feel for the overconsumption of winter.

In nature, animals prepare for hibernation in winter by using the summer and the autumn, right? They graze, they eat berries, they gather nuts. And this is not a sudden frenzied shopping activity, the way that it often seems to be in our society currently. I do know people who are very squirrel-like in their anticipation of the gift giving that they may want to do in the winter, and they prepare for it all through the year by stowing away the little things that they would like to have and use. And I also really prefer this approach. So even as I can see that I am being tempted into overconsumption, I want to look to nature to remind me that my consumption during the season of winter should be based on the preparations that I have made earlier in the year.

In my personal seasonal cosmology, I have focused on the aquifer, and the role that the aquifer plays in symbolizing psychological source or state. The season of Winter, therefore, is the deepest point in the aquifer. It’s the bedrock that is underneath the layers of limestone. I picture entering this season of Winter like the seekers who are approaching the mystery caves of Elysium, finding and lighting a torch, and going down into the labyrinth of my own ideas and creativity, in order to discover some very deep and personal source.

This idea of deep exploration definitely resonates with the fact that, for many of us, the holidays is a time when we get to spend time with family members that we don’t spend time with throughout the rest of the year and encounter deeply buried psychological resonances that are excavated to the light of day. All the dramatic family fights that I can recall from my childhood occurred at Christmas. For many of us, Christmas is just naturally a time of deep psychological tension. But my experience of the winter has been of a season when I have done my best writing, when I have produced the most beautiful and amazing art, when I have created things that I’m very deeply proud of. This tells me that there’s more down there in my psychological bedrock than just old grudges and tension.

When I was writing an outline for this blog post, it occurred to me that this might be a good time for me to explain my decision not to monetize my Substack. Every time I hit “publish” on my Substack, it asks me if I’d like to add the subscribe now buttons, and I say “yes”. But then I have to go in and manually edit the text of the buttons to change the words from “support my work” to “show support for my work,” because I do not intend to monetize my Substack.

Firstly, I’m under no illusions about my relationship to a large corporation that intends to provide a service, right? The odds of any of us writing to ever actually making money off of our Substack newsletters are very low.

But also, the pressure to have my creativity be a source of income for me is one that needs to be considered very carefully. I had a brush with this some years ago when I first eagerly started silk painting, and right away set up an online store, and then realized that my desire to have sales was changing what I was thinking about working on. Back then, my art practice was too soon. I was too new. I didn’t have enough of an artistic identity to actually continuously produce in a way that felt real and creative. And I backed away from selling, and I’m really glad that I backed away. I am doing some sales now, but I can see that it’s more in reflection of inviting people to join me on my journey.

This desire, this commitment not to monetize my Substack also comes from my curiosity and respect for the slow productivity movement. Just as my Oneshirt project is an expression of slow fashion, and my choice to do lots of writing by hand, my desire to paint by hand is a desire to maintain my connection with my capability as a human level producer, and human level producer slowly. My value as a creator is not in my ability to create ever greater quantities of work and charge ever higher prices.

This discernment that I can express through this season of winter is a chance to reaffirm my own choices related to production and consumption. By the time you read this, Black Friday will be over, but Cyber Monday will loom up, flashing lights to “buy, buy buy”. I keep waiting to read the article about how the GLP-1 revolution is not only reducing addiction to alcohol, not only reducing the purchase of snack food, and improving health, but potentially leading to more thoughtfulness related to the other major form of consumption. And helping people realize that they are full. They are satisfied. They are replete as they waddle towards the cave for their wonderful wintertime with their family. They are already such an enormous fat bear that they do not need the season of winter to have as a shopping season.

In lighting my torch and going down into the labyrinth to approach the mysteries of this season, I think about the need to examine and excavate what I already have, who I already am, rather than spending the time thinking about acquiring, or planning, or plotting to become, or to buy something new. And so, I see how our current culture has it exactly backwards. We face the dark, and our response to the dark is to make a shopping list, rather than to think about how we have so much already, and how all that we have can be used to help us deal with the dark.

I’m encouraging you to think about your consumption and to make some plans for how you might be careful to resist the pressure of overconsumption during this season. It can be a time when you can be thoughtful and introspective and really look at the reserves that you already have. For many people, the experience of joining with their family is a chance to look around and realize how the relationships that they’ve carefully cultivated all year long, all the acorns that they have stored away, are themselves a treasure. All this time given to others has ended up expressing the bounty that we now have. This is not something that we can acquire in just one short moment with one online shopping cart. The bounty of Autumn and the peace of Winter is the reflection of a life’s work.

Thank you for reading what emerges from my process.

Gwendolyn

At the bottom of my Wild Rice Banner are two different amphibians, both creatures whose endangered status means they serve as guardians of the San Marcos River by legally preventing over-pumping that would further deplete their habitat. The Texas Blind Salamander has an amazing story, it was discovered in the 1890s when workers drilling a well hit an artesian chamber that is part of the larger limestone complex that feeds the San Marcos River. The white salamanders, with red spots where their eyes should be and permanently extended red gills, live in eternal darkness, but that day were sucked up into the light for the first time. So rare, they only live right here in the caverns of our spring and hunt by sensing the subtle changes in the current in the warm but hidden channels of their caverns.

Their smaller cousins, the red brown San Marcos salamander, are less rare, living in Spring Lake and the first stretches of the river. But both species are vulnerable to more than changes in the water level. Their extremely thin skin means they live almost in union with the water of their home and are exquisitely sensitive to any chemicals or pollution that might enter the aquifer or the river. An improperly conducted oil change in an uphill yard, the casual dumping of cans of paint, while the water will eventually run clear, the wrong poison at the wrong point and these unique creatures will be gone forever.

What makes the salamanders additionally interesting is their history as an alchemical symbol of a completely different element from the water they make their home. The salamander is a symbol of fire in European alchemical mythology. But this starring role was probably given to them completely by mistake. Paracelsus (1493-1541) was a Swiss philosopher who contributed to our development of medicine and is known as a “father of toxicology”. In his posthumously published book “A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on the Other Spirits,” he repeated an assertion made by Aristotle much earlier, that Salamanders were actually created by fire. The source of this myth is likely because the mucous coated skin of salamanders would allow them a brief time to escape when the damp logs they favored for habitat were placed on a fire. The fact that the dampness of the log would serve to lower or extinguish the fire added to this misimpression, since the lowering of the flame would occur just at the moment that amphibians would rush away, drawing attention to their escape.

When sketching out a seasonal creative system, I chose goddesses, elements and even minerals to represent each season. I have designated Autumn as the season of fire in my personal seasonal mythology because I see autumn as a season of transformation and fire leaves behind rich material to nurture change even while creating the change we sometimes fear. And, while the symbolic creature I have chosen to consider is the snake, the connection of salamanders to fire gives me a chance to consider the lessons they might teach as well. But in this case, the lesson of the salamander is very straightforward. The habitat they need to survive is rich and beautiful, the same that we need to survive, and what threatens them, threatens us.

The lesson they share is about us, as creatures, that we can so completely misunderstand what is actually happening and choose a creature of the water to symbolize fire in an early incarnation of chemistry. The father of toxicology told us that salamanders have a special power to protect themselves, but their are in fact, specifically vulnerable to toxins. What we wanted to believe about their fire-proof nature is exactly the opposite. And this can often happen, our desire for a beautiful mythology can sometimes hide important truths that are vital to our survival. In an age of science misinformation, we see this happening around us all the time, could the easily spread myth that a certain new medical treatment caused cancers hide the fact that it actually prevents cancers? Is the truth of a scientific system in details we would never consider unless our drill hit the exact cavern in the well of reality?

Salamanders don’t belong on a list of mythical creatures like sylphs or nymphs or even mermaids, they belong right where they are, in the riverbed and caverns of the spring. But the real fires, the drought from over-pumping, the loss of rainfall from changing climate patterns, the salamander won’t survive this transformation any more than we will. In the fire of our own lives, it is tempting to believe in a creature that can scamper away unscathed, but science tells us this story is not true.

In our quest for transformation during the season of Autumn, a few vulnerable parts of ourselves need to be carefully lifted out of the way and set safely aside, to live out their symbolic lives in the warm dark of our inner lives. The delicate nature of salamanders is not a weakness but wisdom. They are teaching us to pay attention, to recognize danger, to protect what is vulnerable. Sometimes the most magical thing is not invulnerability but sensitivity. Protecting what we know is weak about ourselves means protecting the ability to register what’s wrong before it’s too late. In the last few weeks of Autumn, I am going to spend some time thinking about something about myself and my creative process that I need to designate as precious. Maybe it is my naive mark making, the wobbly lines in my batik, that I will work hard to actually protect instead of change.

Thank you for reading what emerges from my process.

Gwendolyn

Sometimes it feels like we’re waiting forever. And then, all of a sudden, things just happen. Or do they? If you had asked me, a year ago, while I was painting my banners for the Groundwork series that I’ve just recently exhibited for the first time, first time, how exciting to say that, I would have told you that my dream exhibition space would be the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment on the Texas State campus. That’s because people come from all over the state, school children especially, in order to ride out in the glass-bottomed boats and look down through the bottom of the boat to where the water from the aquifer jets out and into the water of the lake, allowing us to see and experience the amazing interface between the mystical world of the aquifer and the real world that we’re in. So when I was given the opportunity to put the Groundwork banners into the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment starting this week, I should have been thrilled. And, of course, I was, at first. But then I stopped, and I asked myself, is there a benefit to taking it slow? What I want to write about today is about the concept of slow productivity, and why, even though my immediate impulse was to say yes, yes, let me have my dream now, I chose to wait.

You might be familiar with the term slow productivity if you have seen the book Slow Productivity by Cal Newport or have read any number of the productivity posts that are being made about the idea of taking it easy. That’s because productivity is very seductive, but it’s also a dangerous trap. When I’m watching the “Planner YouTube” that I enjoy so much, I can see how much the constant doing, and then the tracking of the doing, and then the checking off of the tracking of the doing, and then the sharing of the checking off of the tracking of the doing, how all of it feels like making our lives into something. As an academic, of course, my ultimate isn’t a Bujo journal. It isn’t my Hobonichi Weeks spread. It’s my CV. And my CV continues to grow. I can print it out and see, oh, look, it’s now 28 pages long. Oh, look, I now have eight pages of presentations, not seven. Look at how productive my 20-year career as an academic has been. But right behind the excitement of the sharing of, the checking off of, the tracking of the doing, there is this exhaustion of proving, of continuing to prove, of every day proving, look, see? I’m good enough. And this reveals the dark side to the productivity performance.

The season of autumn, for me, is a season where I think about the metaphors provided by the snake, and I chose the snake because the snake travels between the upper and the lower worlds, because the snake engages in an activity for its own health and protection that is metaphorically illustrative. The snake will shed its skin. At a certain point, the snake grows too large for the container that it’s currently in. And even though that container is kind of a wearable Bujo planner with all the life activities of the snake marked in etching on its own very skin, it will, in fact, slough the skin away, exposing a new, tender self underneath, and leaving that entire previous being behind, as what is now obvious, a paper thin and flaccid sheath, not a whole life.

So when I was thinking of my impulse to say yes, and right behind it, my realization that I needed to say no, I wanted to look at where this pressure to do it now, to have the next thing, where that comes from. And a bit of thinking back and forth, of course, I was able to get right to the good old-fashioned Protestant work ethic. Some of my friends tease me a bit, but I am probably one of the most Protestant people they know. And my very conscientious and scholarly German Protestant upbringing, including two years at a Protestant college, means that I know quite a lot about the Protestant worldview. I know a lot about how the Protestant worldview underlies the larger worldview that we all share without even realizing where it comes from. And, of course, the challenge of the Protestant worldview is that in the Protestant worldview, rest is sin, and working is evidence of our favor with God.

As I have thought about it, the productivity under the Protestant work ethic worldview, it isn’t just burnout, okay? It is walking ourselves to the stake and lighting ourselves on fire to prove that we’re good. To use every last breath to prove that we’re worthy, to prove that we’re in favor with God. So when we measure our worth in our output, in how brightly we can burn when we light ourselves on fire, we’re showing that our value is contingent on our production. Our value is contingent on, to get all Protestant here, our works, and we’re revealing the soul-deep anxiety that we must earn our right to exist. But, of course, right behind that is the Protestant concept that we must always, always remember to pull to the front when raised in a Protestant worldview, and that is that our “right to exist” is because we are a creature that has been created, end of. Our existence is a gift we were given, not a right at all, not a right that we earned.

Now, in contrast with this desperation to have fruit, to show that we are good, and that we have the right to be here, that we have the right to the good things in our life, we could think about other worldviews that take a more ecological approach, and ask us to think about, wouldn’t there be fruit when the fruit is ripe, and if there is no fruit, is it possible that the fruit is not ripe yet? That we don’t need to force the fruit. We can allow it to ripen sweetly on the vine, and only pluck it when it’s really ready.

I asked to postpone my exhibition until spring, in part, because spring is the season of emergence. It’s the season of the evidence. And this makes it the perfect time to have any exhibition. But I also chose to wait until spring because there are things I could be enjoying in the time between now and when I make this second exhibition. I could enjoy writing to my friends and inviting them to come. I could enjoy not having to hassle the facilities people who are going to have to be involved when using a venue of this type. Instead I can know that I have enough time to allow everyone to do their best work. The concept that Cal Newport shares in his book, Slow Productivity, is that we should do less. We should do this less in a natural timeline, and we should focus on quality first. And if I do this, then the highest quality of my exhibition is one where I allow the time for it to wait. That was an easy choice once I took a moment to take a breath and think about what mattered to me.

But it left me with lingering questions. Why was I so eager to take the very next opportunity to prove how good I was? Are there other ways of being, other ways to think about my worth? I’m enjoying reading a book by Robin Wall Kimmerer called Braiding Sweetgrass. I’ve only just gotten started on it, and so I can’t share yet how her approach using the Indigenous wisdom of her family and the botany and plant ecology that she studies as a professor can feed my own thinking about the aquifer. But I have read enough to know that she talks about how the Indigenous approach to life emphasizes reciprocity over productivity, and the thoughtfulness of how we participate in the web. And this leads me back to another thought that I had long ago in Christian college, that the savior of the world came to save the world, and that I am part of the world, that my relationship to the rest of the world is what matters. It is my participation in the web. Other worldviews share this. Buddhism, for example, has a concept of interdependence and an emphasis on the idea that we already belong, that we’re already worthy. And, of course, nature teaches this in other forms, such as the mycorrhizal network. My identity as a human is felt most, or is the most, at the interface between me and the rest of the natural world. I am, we are where we touch each other, where we touch the natural world, where we meet with each other, not in the burning of our essential selves, but in the sharing of our essential selves.

So looking at this snake, when the snake molts its skin, it reveals a new fresh skin underneath, one that is more permeable, more receptive to the web, one that is, just for the moment, perfectly snake. But in the next moment, ready to be touched, to be scored, to be scarred by its participation in the world. This is where the real exchange happens. When I shed my need to be good and perfect in myself, and accept my need to be part of a good and perfect world.

So I’m going to wait for spring. It’s not because I’m waiting to be worthy. I am already worthy. It’s not waiting so that I can be more productive. I am already as ripe and fruitful as I will remain my whole life. It’s really more like waiting for Christmas, for the sweetness of anticipation, knowing that at that moment, when I can share with others what I’ve done, only in that moment does it become what it truly is. What are you waiting for? What are things that you realize will only be the best when you can share them with each other, when you can sit together and open each and every gift that life has given you? Share that with me in the comments.

Thank you for reading what emerges from my process.

Gwendolyn

Standing on the banks of the San Marcos River, I am captivated by the huge bald cypress trees, their roots gripping the banks like enormous hands, with fingers disappearing beneath the water to reach towards the life-giving aquifer. Although I grew up in the Rocky Mountains, I definitely think of myself as a forest girl. I could take or leave the rocky part of the Rocky Mountains, but the faded green stands of ponderosa pines, dotted occasionally with a bright, light, green, or later in the year, orange, gold, of the aspen colonies, that really sparks my love for nature. So when I received a commission to paint a painting for the lobby of a building that will be named the Cypress Building, I was excited to return to painting the trees that I love so much.

I added “learning more about water ecosystems and water science” to my goals for this season. And that meant that, along with walking along the banks of the San Marcos River, looking at photos of cypress trees while walking in the walkers gallery at the San Marcos Activity Center and paying specific attention to the cypress trees of my landscape, I thought I’d probably better bone up on cypress trees.

I started by looking for a book that I could read. The search for books about cypress trees didn’t reveal a lot. There is one famous book, “The Great Cypress Swamps”, that I was able to find on Abe, my favorite online used bookseller, but I didn’t want to wait that long to get started.

So I broadened out my search and thought, “well, what’s the ecosystem that cypress trees are part of?” and “what’s available at my local public library?” This led me to a book called "Swamplands" by Edward Struzik that I was able to check out as an ebook on the Libby app. The swamplands that are the focus of this book start with the tundra bogs of Canada and Siberia and move through other swamp regions before arriving at the southern swamps in the United States.

And here, the cypress tree serves a really important role.

Ancient lineage and longevity: First of all, Cypress trees are among the oldest living groups of trees on Earth, according to my Internet searches. Their ancestors grew across Europe, Asia and North America 20 million years ago, and some of the specimens here in Texas are between 800 and 1,200 years old.

Physical adaptations: The bald cypress trees that grow around here have those distinctive, kind of knees that help to support the trees in soggy, porous earth and also aerate the submerged roots. This is the reason that cypress trees contain a compound called cypressene that helps to prevent rot in the wood, which is why cypress wood is especially valued for things like weatherproof areas, decks and roof shingles, and that sort of thing. Here in central Texas, where I live, the bald cypress tree is wonderfully adapted to go through long periods of dry weather, which is really important. We’re currently in a drought, and being able to hold water internally in the tree until the conditions improve is the reason they have lasted for millennia.

Ecological role: The roots of the cypress tree serve to stabilize the banks, and prevent erosion. They also provide a crucial habitat for wildlife and, like, fish or the amphibians, like the blind salamander [insert link here: Texas blind salamander or Edwards Aquifer endangered species], and for lots of birds. The cypress tree doesn’t grow alone, of course. There’s also trees like pecan, hackberry and sycamores. But the cypress trees are very iconic, in their striking size and unique shaped roots. Having such long and complicated roots, they help to slow floodwaters, which is another reason why we find them so important here.

Connection to aquifer systems: This stabilization is helpful because our rivers are cutting into or coming out of limestone aquifers, and limestone is actually pretty fragile and porous. That’s why it can form such amazing sinkholes, swimming holes, and runnels in the soft limestone. So, the cypress trees are essentially a connector between the aquifer landscape that I’m so interested in, and the river landscape that forms such an important part of our life here. They essentially live on the boundary between the land and the water and stand as doorways to the liminal zone between the river and the aquifer.

The reason that I decided to name the piece I’m working on “Cypress Wisdom” is because it serves as a guiding nature spirit.

As I think about the guidance of the cypress, I imagine how I want to keep my roots deep in the aquifer, providing stabilization. And at the same time, I want to be able to grow, ever upward, ever larger, providing habitats for thousands of ideas that may gather around my roots or set up nests in my branches. And the cypressene oil that prevents decay speaks to the ability to be resistant, to not allow the forces of nature, of weather, and flood, and erosion to change my position. Living like the cypress is to be essentially myself, tall and beautiful and proud, no matter what’s going on in the world around me.

This important tree in our ecosystem provides a model for me in how to incorporate the wisdom of nature into my own life. Bending my knees, lifting my mighty weight, and sinking my roots into the aquifer, all of these are the lessons of the cypress wisdom.

As I work on painting Cypress Wisdom, I’ll be capturing more than a tree, I’ll be painting a portrait of resilience, of roots that refuse to lose their hold on what matters, of growth that happens both above and below the surface. These are the lessons we all need, as artists and human beings, navigating fragile ecosystems in uncertain times.

Thank you for reading what emerges from my process.

Gwendolyn

As I write this, the banners of my Groundwork exhibition have been carefully taken down from the River of Life Gallery with the help of Michelle, rolled in acid free tissue paper to be stored until their next appearance. September 30th marked not just the end of my first solo exhibition, but the completion of an amazing chapter that began with a single banner hung in my studio doorway during last year’s San Marcos Studio Tours.

The photos from our September 6th book signing at Pecantown Books and the September 13th closing reception tell the story of a community that gathered around me as I made this exploration of the unseen world beneath our feet. Looking at the faces of friends, fellow artists, hospital staff, and even strangers who stopped to contemplate the Edwards Aquifer through fifteen silk banners, I’m struck by how well my efforts succeeded. I set out to make a bridge between the scientific and the mythological, “between what we know and what we can only imagine” and I can see with my own eyes, that happened.

As I said in a previous post, this spring was a marathon that became a sprint. What started as a plan to create “a banner a month” evolved into something much more ambitious when I realized these paintings were too beautiful to be lost to time. The companion book, Groundwork: Art of the Aquifers, came out of my desire to memorialize my experience, to give a gift to “myself in the future”. Writing about each piece turned out to be a part of my creative process, a way of understanding what was showing up in my art, some of it from what Jung called “the collective unconscious”.

Standing in the “gallery” for the take down last Tuesday, I felt the satisfaction of seeing all fifteen banners hung respectfully and well-lit, proclaiming my vision over and over in a place where people come seeking healing. Touching the lives of people who weren’t expecting to see something so beautiful on what might be their work day? I consider that a complete bonus.

But now I am standing in a strange threshold space, caught like a snake shedding its skin. The intensity of creating fifteen large-scale works while simultaneously writing and publishing a book, managing exhibition logistics, and celebrating with community has left me tired but transformed. I will never again have “my first solo show”.

You might also have read how the image in my final banner, “Snakes and Eggs,” was such a surprise to me. When I encountered the Orphic egg motif, a snake wrapped around an egg symbolizing the universe’s birth, I was excited to learn about how in Greek mythology, Ananke, the Goddess of Inevitability, cracks the cosmic egg. What came out of the cosmic egg was new life “on golden wings” and that’s a bit how I feel now. The Goddess of Inevitability crushed me in her powerful coils and out of me popped an exhibition and a book. No wonder I feel a bit drained.

In my seasonal creative mythology I have named Autumn as the time of the ancient Snake Goddess. This is the perfect time to follow the wise serpent down into the cozy hole of my studio to gestate new ideas for the rest of the year. Stay tuned for the spring, when we will see what emerges. I’m excited to work with my students on the Oneshirt project and of course, the Subsurface Oracle project is calling to me. And I won’t be able to resist for long the allure of ideas for new textile works draw me even deeper below the surface of life into the pool of ideas and beauty that connects us all.

Through this exhibition, I’ve offered my take on the beauty of the one place we all love. So I have to start by thanking the Edwards Aquifer, underground source of life. To everyone who visited the gallery, came to the book signing, attended the closing reception, or supported this work from afar, thank you for being part of something deeper than us all.

The Groundwork book is available on Amazon, Apple Books, and at gwendolynstudio.com/groundwork

Thank you for reading what emerges from my process.

Gwendolyn

So, I was thinking about this from the perspective of the Season of Autumn. My autumn metaphor isn't just about loss as we prepare for winter, but it's also about harvesting and wise planning. In reflecting on how adapting to the changing seasons can ensure that we have the resources we need for the future, I made my own choice. I am going to be shifting from a weekly post to a biweekly posting schedule in order to really make the best use of my time.

In thinking about this harvest metaphor (and who isn't thinking about it now that pumpkin spice lattes are available). I’m not a farmer, but I worked for farmers back when I was in early college as a field scout. I know that driving down the country roads there in Nebraska in late summer and early autumn, you could drive by one field that had been completely harvested and drive by another field that was still waiting. It depends on the crop, and it depends on the hybrid planted, and it depends on the farmer's plan, their capacity for storing the grain in a silo versus storing it in the field, so to speak. It depends on projections of the weather and how urgent it might be to get the crop out of the way.

All of that means that somebody who's doing wise planning with their resources has to consider these different factors. Thinking about this in relation to my teaching, I need to look over my fields, as it were. With the loss of support, I have to ask myself: what things may not be urgent? My undergraduate assistant helped with deadlines on the website. Do my students really depend on those deadlines? Could I just post one list instead of a set of attractive thumbnail cards? When it comes to my teaching, what things am I doing that are actively high impact versus things that take a lot of my time because I've always done it that way, but may not actually yield anything for my students? Sustainable Fashion Week comes to mind. My TA has supported my production of this series of workshops and speakers for the past three years, but if there isn’t real buy-in from my colleagues or additional students, do I need to explore some other demonstration of our values? I learned a while ago that a good idea is only a good idea if other people want to do it too. If I can’t pass the torch on Sustainable Fashion Week, it might not be a good idea; it might not, ironically, be sustainable.

Now, as I get ready to spend the autumn with my students and my creativity, I'm going to think about different creativity and research opportunities that may need just a little tending. Some, like exploring new exhibition venues, may just need checking on and then left in the field to be harvested later. Or there may be other situations where storm clouds are coming and I really need to get right in there and get them taken care of, like the sewing course I started offering last summer.

And of course, this leads to the key skill that I'm going to have to exercise in this situation, the one that is really hard for me. Turns out I'm a bit of a masochist, a bit of a stoic. I really enjoy suffering, apparently, and I love suffering with the hope that people will notice how noble I am in suffering for my art or for my students. But I need to practice the art of saying no. I need to think through what might be a permanent change in this situation versus something temporary, so that I don't go off half-cocked and cut something that I might want later. And I'm going to welcome this opportunity to really think through: what is the actual focus of my mission? How can I align what I'm doing at work even more strongly with my values now that I have these constraints? If a colleague I haven’t heard from in a while emails to ask if I will collaborate on a new research project, I will have to remember that more is not more; more is less in the end.

Besides this active harvesting, another thing that happens in nature at this time of year is that things go dormant, right? Perennials…they're going to come back next year. And so I also need to look and think through: what is actually going to die and needs to be chopped up and maybe used for fertilizer, and what things could go dormant? Is there an activity in my life that I could bank under some leaves and come back and check on it later? Because, as we know, underground, things are happening. Root systems can strengthen even when the surface looks as if it's dead or dormant. And there's a promise in that dormancy. How much fun is it, right, to move the leaves aside and discover this whole teeming colony of insect life that's producing new fresh soil?

During this time of year, there are some things that naturally go underground. And when I think about my major metaphor, the aquifer, as the heat fades and the draw on the aquifers reduces a bit, the limestone layers can refill, right? I might distill some things I was trying to do in the classroom back to core concepts. I might pick one program retention activity that I believe is really going to help my students and foster retention, instead of engaging in a bunch simply because I have the help to do it. In the example I mentioned before, I can think about ways that I could use my skills with the website to focus on the essentials, instead of trying to show everybody how my website is head and shoulders above the others.

In the future, I might see that this budget cut actually revealed some essentials, right? Gave me some information about what I'm doing that's important. Some things were ornamental, right? A beautiful-looking border versus a really healthy apple tree. Is a second or third project essential or is it ornamental? And here is the clarity.

Has writing a weekly blog been essential? I'm going to have to say at the moment, “no”. It has been useful for me to work out my ideas related to my concept of the aquifer. I feel like I have generated a lot of fertility here, and I suspect that these ideas that I have planted will flower next year. Pruning improves the stock, and it is possible that pruning back my blog posts here will improve their quality. The things that I cut down at the moment, such as writing a post for you every week, will lay and molder and provide rich fertilizer for something in the future.

Scarcity teaches us the value of what's being stripped away, and in this case, the value of what remains. And what remains is the satisfaction of working with my students. And honestly, as somebody who apparently is a bit of a masochist, the satisfaction of making do, of being frugal, of doing something amazing with not very much has always thrilled me. We know from creativity theory that constraints often promote greater creativity. I know this to be true in my own artistic practice. The jurist at the recent show here at the San Marcos Art Center selected my work to feature in the Winners Showcase. His comments shared his reflections on what I showed I could do within the very narrow constraints of batik on silk. Without saying this, he recognized I had made the choice to stay with a restrictive medium in order to understand how I could express my ideas using just dye and resist. My work grows out of resistance.

Next, I’m going to embrace this season. Pulling on the cloak of adaptability. Lifting my head with dignity, realizing that times of abundance gave me the opportunity to do quite a lot, to produce a lot of fruit. But now that the fruit has fallen, I can adapt and use the decay of abandoned projects and tasks to provide rich fertilizer for the future, even if I am not growing as many things in my garden, so to speak.

Of course, I invite you to think through this metaphor and engage using the comments. What portion of the abundance of growth in your life will you harvest and what will you let go dormant to wait for later or to serve as fertilizer for the future?

Thank you for reading what emerges from my process.

Gwendolyn