Creative Headspace #6

Stories about the power of creative connections and how to make room in your mind for things to unfold.

• I signed up for Wendy MacNaughton’s 30-day “Draw Together” challenge, where you respond to a drawing prompt once a day for 30 days. She is the artist who created the illustrations in Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking, and she runs this beautiful community on Substack encouraging people to draw more. I love her philosophy and her energy, and I have always wanted to learn to draw, so I did the challenge. Wendy emphasizes that there is no right way and there should be no self-judgment — it’s just about moving the pencil and learning to see. I wish I could accept that, but I can’t; I know I can’t draw and I wish I could somehow just magically know how to draw, and that gap frustrates me. I did six days and then stopped.

• But in those six days, Wendy mentioned a friend of hers, Lena Wolff, who was offering a three-day virtual course on color theory and mixing paint sounded like fun. Lena is a collage artist and I love collage. I signed up.

• I spent the three months before the course buying all the paint and paper and special brushes on the materials list. I visited online and in-person art stories, and received giant boxes in the mail with the large sheets of the special paper we were to have on hand. I laid everything out on my huge dining room table.

• On the first day of class, the students introduced themselves. There was a textile artist, a florist, and a graphic designer — and I thought, Oh no, they will all be good at color mixing. They will all speak the same language. So I said that I worked with words and that I was just there to mess around with paint. Maybe that took all the pressure off. We mixed colors, cut out shapes, and glued things together, and I loved it. I made big pools of violet, orange, and grey on my white dinner plates and I kept mixing until the colors made me happy.

• The class unfolded over three Sundays and during that time, I began to see the world in totally different ways. I understood why I don’t like to wear a certain wine-colored jacket I own; the color was too saturated. I understood what to do with a corner of my office underneath a large indigo-blue painting; I’d been scared to put anything on the white couch that might clash with the painting—until I learned to look on the opposite side of the color wheel. I needed red-orange! I found myself looking carefully at the sky, the California poppies blooming everywhere after the rainy winter, and the green glass tile in my friends’ newly remodeled kitchen.

• For months, I kept my eyes open for the perfect shade of red-orange in a pillow or a blanket to go on that couch in that corner of my office, but everything I saw was too orange, or too red, or too pink. The only exception was a color-blocked wool blanket made by two sisters in England that was both too expensive and too risky to have shipped across the sea — what a pain to ship it back if the stripe of orange wasn’t right or the blanket wasn’t soft.

• Last weekend, my friends took me out for a birthday outing to Ojai, a lovely little town in a valley about 10 miles inland from the ocean. One feature of Ojai is that they do not allow chain stores, so there are all kinds of quirky little restaurants and shops. We had a leisurely lunch under the oak trees, then wandered around and looked at art, jewelry, and clothing. When we got in the car to leave, my friend Shelly, who runs what she calls a “junk” business (think beautiful vintage shirts and giant refinished wooden bowls and gorgeous necklaces made from found objects), said we should stop at one of her favorite stores on the edge of town — an eclectic modern art and clothing shop.

• I walked in and admired the twisty sculptural candles, the woven leather satchels, the vibrant ceramic vases, and a hand-knit wool poncho — and then I turned around and saw it draped on a wicker bench: the blanket from England with the red-orange stripe! It was part of a tableau with an orange and blue-piped throw pillow and a floppy blue stuffed dog. I gasped and immediately knew I would take it all home. I have recently reclaimed the space where I work (which used to double as a guest room) and have been filling it with things that inspire creativity and make me smile; I knew that this blanket and the story of encountering it on my 60th birthday outing with my friends would delight me every single day and that when my granddaughter Lucy is a little older, she will give the floppy dog a hug and a name.

• I am looking at it all now. It is so good.

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