31 Days of Starts

For March 15-April 15, encaustic teacher and leader Patricia Baldwin Seggebruch offered a series of daily classes called 31 Days of Starts! | Open Studio (pbsartist.com). Trish’s offerings (more at her site in the link), are always great and I always take something away. Trish taught at the very first encaustic workshop I took at the Grunewald Guild in Leavenworth, WA in 2011. During 2020 when Covid-19 shut everything down, Trish took her classes, workshops and classes online, just hoping for the best.

She found (and many of us who joined her found) that zoom could in fact be a wonderful place to co-work as artists. We all have workspaces filled with supplies that work for us, in places that work for us….packing up crates full of supplies for an art date at someone else’s shop is fun occasionally, but you don’t want to consistently disrupt your workshop and spend time packing and unpacking and finding and refinding your essential kit, either.

I participated in the 2020 Virtual EncaustiCamp, and loved joining Trish and the other teachers that summer from my own home (I even set up outdoors under a canopy and worked each day of the camp in my backyard!)

But back to April, 2023 (where we have yet to break 60 degrees here in the PNW). Trish offered this small daily practice class via zoom and I joined in with about sixteen other folks to call in each day. Some guided activities or meditations were included, but some days we just chatted for a bit, and then painted to music. The practice of rewriting my daily appointment, practicing the muscle of just showing up, taping the edges of a pieces of watercolor or canvas and getting started, even if just for 15 minutes, was magical.

Here are some of the photos from the month:

I was surprised by how much I got done, how many ideas came around, simply by showing up. I mean I’ve read the books, watched the TED talks, gone through The Artist’s Way, and so I know that yes, this is how it happens. But I was still surprised and encouraged. How much could you get done in 15 minutes a day at whatever thing you are trying to grow in?

On Teaching

I started out in my day-job career with teaching. I didn’t study education or go down the route of certification, but I thought I might want to do that later, so I searched and searched and interviewed during my post-graduation summer, while I was working full-time running staff at a summer camp that only stayed in one location every week. That summer, as we drove down the 580 freeway at sunset in big vans, headed to our next college campus home for the week, the sunset over the velvety mauve hills of northern California in midsummer gave me strong punch of intuition that only took the form of the conscious thought that “I could live here.” In that moment, dreamily watching an oddly-shaped hill formation that looked a bit like Honolulu’s Diamond Head, for no reason I could name, I just felt a conviction that I could make a life in that place.

Less than 4 weeks later, I was driving up the road to my new teacher orientation at a school. With a surreal clarity of that memory from the summer, I realized as I followed my Google maps printout that the school sat directly at the foot of that very same oddly pyramid-shaped hill, just off the 580 freeway in a windy pass above the tri-cities area between San Jose, Sacramento, and San Francisco.

I’ve had premonition-type moments of knowing like that at some points in my life, and I’ve just taken it with a grain of salt and a sense of gratefulness that I can count it as confirmation that I am where I’m supposed to be, in a way. A confirmation of sorts, for my doubting, second-guessing, maybe-I’m-crazy-or-just-very-wrong-about-everything self.

But signs are sometimes what we make of them. That strong sense of knowing was almost like something outside of my normal senses. Some might call it a leading. Some might call it God. Sometimes I wish I had that sense about other areas and times in my life, even now. Where did that sense of courage, a kind of certainty in the questions come from, and where is it now?

What did it mean that I left teaching at that school after 3 years, and the Bay Area altogether after 4 years? What happened to that sense of knowing then? Had I done what I was ‘led’ to do there, mission completed? Did I fail that sense of purpose somewhere, to be dismissed back to my hometown?

I certainly felt like a failure at the time. My car had broken down. My roommates were dispersing, I was searching for housing in a very expensive area on a too-small salary at a local church, and other job opportunities had failed to materialize.

But I can’t forget that sense of reality and peace that came with that almost-mystical sense of knowing that had settled me in that suburban corner of the Bay Area. I don’t know the why or wherefore of it. As Kate Bowler writes, Everything Happens for A Reason was a lie that I, too, loved when I was looking for meaning in my life, for explanations of purpose or, honestly, justifications for choices that I had made.

Teaching creates connections

The things I know to be true and purposeful about that first installment in a rocky road of adulthood and career are really few and far between. I have that sense of surety about moving there in the first place. I have lovely memories and difficult ones, of course—lifelong friends, friends who were part of that season only, and mainly-Facebook acquaintances who occasionally pop up in real life, including a former student or two who managed to reconnect after social media made it easier.

I do know that something has stuck with me about teaching. Or rather, teaching has stuck to me. At almost every stage of life since then, teaching has been a part of my life, as either a part of work or as a volunteer opportunity.

In the fifteen years since I started learning and working with encaustic art, I’ve taught casually, mostly because people had no idea what encaustic was and I had to demonstrate it in order for people to understand what the heck I was talking about. One friend got a group of people together and did a workshop in her home years ago, and during the early pandemic in 2020, after lost my day job in Educational Technology and my side gig teaching cooking lessons, and was isolated to my home, I thought “what better time to work on art than now?” but I struggled to get started on my own.

It took a friend asking if I would teach her friend, who also happened to be unemployed at the time, to do encaustic painting to change that. Cecilia found the process exciting and came over about 2 times a week for the next few months. Sometimes I’d work with her, sometimes I’d be doing other things, and then she started bringing other friends, too, each with something different to bring to the medium.

We’d set up food and drink in the kitchen, and then get to work in the studio. As summer approached, we worked outside in my driveway at a big table. We moved on to add figure drawing workshops locally, and people who came to my house to learn Encaustic invited me to their homes to learn textile work, jewelry techniques, or printmaking.

Being open to sharing what I’d learned opened all those doors and led me to so many great friends.

So, after moving several hours away in order to take an opportunity to settle closer to my family and recover from Seattle, I looked around for new opportunities to teach. In the years since moving away from Whatcom County and back, the Jansen Art Center had been established in my hometown to offer art classes. I met with staff at the Jansen to ask if they were interested in encaustic as a medium, and they were, but hadn’t been able to locate an instructor. I proposed an intro series of lessons, but wasn’t sure if enough people would be interested in signing up to make the class worthwhile.

To my surprise, 8 people signed up, almost all of them completely new acquaintances to me (and one old friend from high school). I carted over tub of supplies and set up early to get the wax melting. Once we got to know each other a little, teaching was the same as it always was—showing techniques, offering opinions and experience, making mistakes, correcting mistakes, and learning from mistakes (wait til the wax cools a little before going at it with a scraper!).

No one experienced major injury from torch, griddle, or heat tools by the time of this report, and my sister came along one evening to take some photos.

Among my students were beekeepers, artists, ceramicists, teachers, and photographers, and each one applied their own voices to the encaustic process. I know some of them are planning to keep going and I can’t wait to see what they make. I’m going to be teaching more soon at the Jansen, if you’re interested in taking classes, you can become a member here, or subscribe to get their updates. Classes usually open for registration on a quarterly basis.

Bleak Midwinter

It’s actually only the beginning of winter, according to our calendar. But the first day of winter here coincides with the winter Solstice, which is the longest night of the year. We’ve already begun our trip back toward the light, though winter is but one day old.

I am not a salesperson and have never been one, aside from a brief successful run at selling candy bars for a school fundraiser at age 6. Most of that success was down to one person, who happened to be having a party in our neighborhood, and may or may not have been drunk. That kind of thing went totally over my head at age 6. With great jollity he told the cute kindergartener he’d buy my entire stock for the party, and he probably meant the stock contained in the carrying case in my hand.

But in a whirl of optimism, I understood him to mean every candy bar I currently had in stock—including the 50 or so my mom had in the car to replenish my little carrying case. When my mom carried the two boxes of candy bars up the steps after I ran back out to the car to tell her we had sold ALL of the candy bars, the jolly smile on the man’s face faltered a little. But he paid up magnanimously and I won the honors of top salesperson for my grade in the fundraiser.

Selling stuff is not super fun for me. Making money, the thrill of a sale, has never really motivated me, except in that the funds allow me to do or have something that is important. Making art to sell isn’t super compelling to me, either, which is why I have not done it much over the years.

“I Know Why” -encaustic, eggshells, woodburning, oil, silverleaf and fabric on cradled board. Private Collection.

But something happens when a friend or acquaintance brings a piece into their home or workspace or office or studio. I love what happens then, because it’s presence, and that is very much what have come to care about.

A thought or idea, feeling or memory or story of mine, put onto paper or canvas or board, sometimes taking years to develop and complete, becomes a part of your life, your space, your family’s memories and stories, and it takes on a life of its own.

After my last attempt at selling art in an Etsy shop, a close friend of mine from childhood who now lives far away bought one of my favorite encaustic paintings. About a decade later, I got to visit her home on the other side of the country.

Spending a few days with her family, I got to see the piece in different lights and contexts on her living room wall. Playing with her four children, I saw how they interacted and loved and fought and were bored or inspired, the kinds of things they laughed about and cried about and shared as a family. I loved to see that painting on the wall, part of the family.

The past few days of opening my new website and launching the shop here have been a whirlwind!

I can’t tell you how grateful I am for everyone who bought pieces, and shared about the launch with friends and family. It has meant a lot to me to see the response and to spend the week before Christmas packing up pieces and making trips to the Post Office. I was able to get most of the orders out before the snow and ice storm set in here in Whatcom County.

I hope you and your families are keeping warm and cozy during this storm. I’ll have more news about upcoming projects soon. Merry Christmas to you and yours! Keep watching for the light.

Love,

Jana

PS: If you are local to Whatcom County, registration is currently open for an Intro to Encaustic Painting course I am hoping to teach at the Jansen Art Center in Lynden! You can find more info about that and register here.

PPS: there are still a few pieces available in the shop! I’ve even added a few more here and there as I’ve been finding things in the studio after moving this fall.

It’s a Shop

The first project to talk about here is this shop drop of December 2022. I was given the gift of a part-time role with room and board in 2022. It even came with a studio space. I wanted to get into a flow state and just make after all the years of working multiple jobs, trying to get startups off the ground, and then, in 2020, losing my job just before a global pandemic that shut down hiring. After 9 months of unemployment, I took an entry level job at a grocery store for a year, just to have somewhere to be and something to do with the anxiety I felt in the middle of the pandemic. I could have made more money staying on unemployment, honestly, but it truly felt good to put in a day of work baking cookies, personalizing cakes, making lattes, and counting inventory at 4am. After six months at the grocery store, still applying and interviewing for other roles, it became apparent that it wasn’t working for me financially to keep working a low-wage job and stay in my little apartment.

How I grieved this loss of home! I have grieved every home I’ve ever left to an unreasonable degree. I feel a deep longing for home, and it isn’t at all connected to pragmatic human need for basic shelter. The space I occupy is something primally important to me, though for most of my life it’s been rentals and roommates, not any space I could totally make my own. For my nine years in Seattle, I worked hard to keep a home of my own—but the cost became too great, in terms of financial stability, and—as many discovered in the early pandemic—for the loneliness and isolation of being a single woman living alone and hours from family.

This 2022 offer of space and home meant so much to me; it moved me closer to many family members, for one. With all of the barriers to making art removed, I hoped that I could walk into my studio at some point after moving, organizing, and setting up the space and just…start working. And that’s not what happened. I walked into my studio each day, and felt…aimless. confused. afraid. anxious. I struggled to get started. I organized. I cleaned. I prepped canvases and boards. I organized again. I made paint, encaustic medium, encaustic gesso. I taped off the edges of blank boards. I gessoed over old and unfinished canvases. I thought by focusing on the newness of blank space, something would eventually occur.

It didn’t—not in a big, obvious way.

And no one was more disappointed by that than me. Disappointed, I tried to keep showing up, even if it was just to be in the space for a while, even if what I did there was watch a tv show, read a book, or write for a while. I talked on the phone with friends as I doodled, toyed with watercolors, tested materials, and experimented with clay or ink or pencil. I made a few things. It felt like pushing a rock uphill, and I struggled with direction and purpose.

There was deeper, less productive work to be done. I needed to grieve some things, and process other things after nearly a decade of desperately believing that work would someday, somehow, save me and give me the home and stability and freedoms I wanted—only to face layoffs, startup fails, unemployment, and, finally, burnout following yet another hopeful round of the carnival of broken dreams, disappointed belief, and unkept promises.

I needed to stare blankly into space, watch the weather, listen to the rain on the metal roof of my shop, talk at length with dear friends. I baked bread. I spent time with my nieces, listened to podcasts and audiobooks, and did some deep learning. Not everyone gets the chance to do this work, and I am grateful, although it didn’t look like I thought it would.

I did The Artist’s Way process and wrote morning pages. I read books on process. I took classes. I went on long walks. I started working with a coach, and meeting with a spiritual director.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, things began to happen the more I showed up, determined to make something to fight the darkness. Then the year of time was up and I had to move again, another home proved temporary. As I packed up and grieved another loss, I began to find that I had made more than I realized. I had played around with watercolor for a few years, and during the pandemic, I started painting abstract botanicals in watercolor, adding ink-pen lines, and then tearing the piece into post-card-size pieces and sending them out to friends. This process of painting, defining, dividing, and then sending out these little puzzle-messages to the four corners of the earth became precious to me.

summer garden watercolor and ink on paper, torn into postcards

When I didn’t know what to do in the shop, and I felt the passage of my one year weighing on me, I would sometimes do these little groups of watercolor paintings. It allowed me to explore and be playful with composition and color. Landscape, especially the one outside my own window here in the Pacific Northwest, has always hummed in my bones and echoed in my interior story.

Rooted as they are in landscape, there are elements of fantastic and surreal colors and intuitive forms in some of them. Just like my little watercolor postcards that were inspired by real forms, but abstracted by form, light, and the movement and transparency of the watercolor paint itself, these landscapes show me more than just what is visible to the eye.

Landscape, the created world, is the original human home. The beauty of a sunset, a shoreline, a rainbow’s fall, the light after a storm just before sunset, the deep gray rainclouds, and the neon green of spring grass, the clear and distant cut of a mountain line against the sky reminds me we were meant to have a home. And it wasn’t just a shelter—it was a place of beauty. It wasn’t temporary, but eternal.

Not what I expected as a body of work I hoped to develop over the year, but I’ve come to love and treasure them, and now it’s time to let them go. Those works comprise the bulk of this shop launch, although I have a few acrylics and encaustics listed, too.

One of the goals I had made with my coach was to do a show or sell some work this fall. So here I am, on the cusp of Christmas, working to a deadline to try this selling-my-own-art thing.

It scares me. It’s weird to sell your own creativity, to price paintings, to assign a dollar value to something you made…to deal with taxing and shipping it. But I’m working on the faith it takes to share my work with people who like and want it in their lives and in their homes, and especially those who, like me, long for a home and the saving grace of beauty.

So here it is; the shop launch.

Thanks for being here.