Keeping the Thread

A painter's notes on presence, doubt, and keeping a hand in it

Hi friends.

I’ve been quiet on Substack and social media lately. Not for any reason in particular... except summer.

Much as I aspire to the consistency of a year-round daily painter, summer and life catch me by surprise each year. The lack of routine in my daughter’s day invites me to also deviate from mine, often going days or weeks without stepping foot in the studio.

This used to really bother me. I saw it as a lack of discipline, a loss of focus or drive. These days, I’ve come to make peace with it, almost looking forward to it the way my daughter looks forward to the last day of school. Summer is my time to step away from regular studio practice and just be present. Present with her, present with the season. Travel, time off, the breaking of every routine and schedule that structures the rest of the year.

And that matters. The window of having summers with a teenage daughter is closing. I can feel it. So I’m choosing to be fully there.

I’m also learning something about stepping away from any consistent practice, meditation, reading, painting, working out, baking sourdough. The longer you’re gone, the harder it is to find your way back. To feel the ease and joy and purpose in pursuing your craft, and instead find doubt creeping in. Can I still do this? Am I still any good at it? What does this practice even look like anymore?

It’s a real thing. And for me at least, it happens faster than I’d think.

This summer, in the midst of travel and all that the season brings, I’m trying something different. I’m not abandoning the studio entirely. I’m just keeping a thread alive. Not in the way I usually do. No long hours at the big table, finished paintings, the pressure of making something good. More like this: color swatches in a notebook. Sketches on my iPad between museum visits or Veronica Mars shows. Photography of light and color that stops me mid-sidewalk. Small paintings with my travel watercolor palette. Things that might become something in the future, or might not. That’s genuinely not the point.

The point is that I’m creating. Keeping my hand moving. Building the muscle memory of picking up a paintbrush, of thinking in color, of figuring out composition. So that when September comes and I walk back into that studio, it doesn’t feel like starting from zero. It doesn’t feel like shock.

My challenge this summer is to be both things at once. Fully present with my daughter, knowing this time is finite, and also in quiet conversation with my creative practice. Not one or the other. Both.

I’m curious what that looks like for you, if you’re navigating the same thing. How do you stay connected to the things that matter when life pulls you away from them?

— Jill

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Before you go... a few things feeding my summer.

On my radar and in my sketchbook:

Emma Larsson (@zebrakadebra) — a Stockholm-based artist and illustrator whose work sits somewhere between colorful dreamscape and inarticulable melancholy. She works in watercolor, oil, and acrylic, describing her practice as an ongoing exploration without rules. That phrase alone. I keep coming back to her feed.

David Hockney’s pool paintings from the 1970s — I’ve been revisiting these lately and remembering why they stopped me the first time. Simple, masterful, and endlessly generous with color and light.

Which sent me back down a rabbit hole to Slim Aarons and Richard Diebenkorn — three artists who, entirely separately, became obsessed with the same California light, the same particular quality of mid-century leisure and architecture. Hockney painted it. Diebenkorn abstracted it. Aarons photographed it. Together they form an accidental portrait of a place and a feeling that doesn’t quite exist anymore. Worth an afternoon of looking.

What I’m wearing poolside (or aspiring to):

Been eyeing a printed swimsuit and equally loving this, this and this.

All three - playful prints, flattering fits, the kind of swimwear that makes you actually want to get in the water.

On my nightstand:

Fredrik Backman's Anxious People — a failed bank robbery, a group of strangers thrown together in an apartment, and somehow one of the warmest and funniest books about the human condition you'll ever read. Backman has this particular gift for taking impossible, anxious, broken people and making you love every one of them. Perfect summer reading precisely because it asks nothing of you except to pay attention to other people. Which, it turns out, is everything.