The Thing About Spring Beginnings

is how endlessness = beginningness

I read something about endings recently, about how nothing really ends so why do we think we need such endy endings? The best endings are also beginnings. Once upon a time… and then an ending to imagine a story which might come next.

Maybe I dreamt I read this but in any case I agree either with what I read or with myself, dreaming.

But the studio this week has been lovely in its disjointedness because I’ve been out a lot, outside in the spring and its warming grey rainy days and also its partial sunshine. I’ve contorted my walk to place myself under big pink blooming cherries and white apples and big booby magnolias and even found a dogwood whose yellow into coral into pea green colors were so breathtaking I stopped and stared for a few minutes. Yes tulips. Yes daffodils. Yes to tough little cookie flowers. And BIG YES to the eccentricity of the colors Spring green, sap green, leaf green: baby greens so fresh and new.

The endlessness to these weeks of spring is an order I recognize from existing for a few years on this earth, letting the spring into my quiddity, a word I just found to use in lieu of more boring words: pith, essence, inner being. The endlessness though, begins to come to an end at some point, but no! It’s just summer beginning. So again, the end is but a beginning. Maybe this will help the writers among us who are always looking for an ending. Endlessness = Beginningness.

Myself and my quiddity painted lions and rivers and a lot of water this week in these hundred days of writing and painting, taking turns until a conversation happens between the two. This too is an endlessness and a beginniness. This too takes the Spring with it as it turns into something more or something just else.

Midweek, I sat with Sophie Blackall at lunch and preparation for our workshop at Milkwood this July (!!!) We sat for forever it seemed at Sullaluna, a children’s book cafe in NYC, (the same Sullaluna where, a few Springs ago I stayed in an apartment just beside where I met my husband and our friends in Venice after the Bologna Children’s Book Fair!)

All this to say, Sophie told me about the cyanometer, her scale of the colors of the waters of the oceans and seas she made on her sea voyage to Australia across the oceans and seas earlier this year. In the wondering of why one might need something like this I think the consensus we discovered was simply that our close looking and making is one way to reckon with our awe.

And now for the pictures which emerged this week and a few wonderings and endings which have become beginnings for next week.

Sometimes things like this happen and it gives me a beginning with which to think. Is it done? Maybe not. Maybe?

For my Drawing Workout! I found a river in myself!

I have been obsessively painting black to find shapes from old beginnings, then ending with new marks to make new beginnings again. See what I mean?

ONE WEEK LEFT TO APPLY for BOOKBINDING & MAGIC MAKING with me and Margaux Kent of Peg & Awl

ONE MORE WEEK to apply to join Margaux Kent and me at Highlights this Fall, a bookbinding and book filling extravaganza!

Linked here we hope you’ll apply to join us, space is limited to twelve artists, makers, doers and thinkers but if the demand is popular, we might add new dates for next year!