“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”

-Joan Didion

I found this quote on Design for Mankind, a well written personal blog by Erin Loechner I just started following. And it’s perfect.

Since no one but my mom will be reading this blog for sometime, I can flop around figuring out what I want to write about and share here.

I’m obsessed with a pretty wide variety of things. And things you care about doing well is where art and love live.

So this space is probably going to be about art. And love and life. But mostly art.

Everything I truly love is about life and art. Gardens and plants, natural health and eating well, painting, illustration and interior design.

Homemaking and parenting.

In all honesty, I am not one of those women who always wanted babies. I don’t swoon over babies. I had my one perfect, beautiful girl, and that was enough. And she really is perfect.

And now that my perfect baby is battling cancer, like a champ, my parenting life has become quite a bit more intense.

But parenting is intense isn’t it? By definition. Nothing else will force you to grow and face what this life is really about than having your heart tied to a little soul you are responsible for.

And parenting her comes up almost immediately when I sit down to write here. But she prefers her privacy, and she’s not a baby anymore. She can and does Google her name and mine.

I didn’t publish yesterday’s post because it was full of my joys and anxieties for her. And I don’t think she would appreciate it. I want to respect her space.

This is why I’m not posting daily progress reports. Also, as I mentioned, we try really hard not to give her cancer too much of our bandwidth. We have made important lifestyle improvements to support her, and we have to carry on with LIFE.

How best to parent this being, sent to us from the stars, IS my life and my biggest obsession.

But my life is also full of my love of all things aesthetic. It runs through everything I do. I love this quote below from Helena Bonham Carter.

Something to strive for.

Plants. While my own garden is usually somewhat neglected, I love gardening. And gardening is not about being tidy. Everything from organic soil management to new and old ideas in landscape design. A barren lawn devoid of diverse life and beauty provided by plants is just crushingly bleak. My own garden is wild and overgrown, but it is teeming with life. Small but significant universes out there in that tangle of plants.

Art. In art school, studying painting and drawing which feeds my soul, I quickly became aware that I was as interested in the space around the work as the work itself. But I wasn’t drawn to the trend of creating installations. Piling a bunch of crap into an empty gallery space and trying to squeeze significance out of it.

No, I was interested in a much more domestic and less conceptually lofty idea of interiors.

I became obsessed with what colour to paint the walls. To create the formal visual context. To create a feel with colour relationships. Even when I start a painting, I typically start with a colour idea first. Never a story, never ever a message or meaning. Sometimes a shape or a feel.

But usually colour.

For the last decade and a half I have had a basket full of paint decks and colour chips right next to my chair. I analyze and explore colours for fun. Weird right?

So I’ve turned that into a career. Since 2015 I have been very lucky to work for my amazing kindred colour obsessed mentor and friend, Maria Killam.

I get to work with, think and write about colour for a living. It’s SO fun.

And decorating has been more in line with my life as a homemaker overall than cloistering in the painting studio. Although I love and adore doing that, in this phase of my life, my energy flows into more naturally into homemaking.

I love to write. I have always loved writing. And I’m here to discover what stories I want to tell. About art about life, maybe about fungi, books, sleep and maintaining sanity.

This blog is a space to share and think about all those things. Things that are all about bringing life closer to art and art closer to life.