Three Leaves
This year’s paper cut was inspired by three leaves that blew into my studio, the experience of drawing them in walnut ink, rural Pensylvanian folk art, and probably the Blindboy podcast.
We moved into new studios this year. They’re above the storied Mother Foucault’s bookstore. Martha put a lot of work into making our floor, where the studios are, an artistic community as the manager of the studios at 711 SE Grand, or just 7-11. They’re just two blocks down the street from our last studio, and about two blocks in the other direction from the Portland Storage Building, where I kept a studio for about a decade. But they are miles nicer than either, and, most importantly, part of a growing and thriving community.
The neighborhood has its ups and downs, and can get pretty rough in plenty of ways. It’s also just loud, but somehow this studio, in a 115 year old building, feels secure and homey without being shut off from the place where it is. If anything, it’s more engaged with the goings on of the neighborhood, rough and smooth, than any of our others.
It’s been a hard year for pretty much everybody in some way, and it’s been a really hard year for focusing on work, whether its creative work or just the work you have to do. We’ve been very lucky with our immediate community and projects, and the spaces, physical, social, and conceptual, that we’ve found ourselves in. Somehow we did a lot.
At one point this autumn, when the future of our new, lovely studio felt very uncertain, a few leaves blew in the window I had cracked to air out some of my brushes overnight. Another instance of the outside world invading the studio. I’ve been doing a lot of drawing with walnut ink in recent years, and the color and texture of the leaves reminded me of walnut ink and how paper ripples when you really load it up. I decided to draw one, life size. Then I drew its friends. It was really satisfying.