I've Always Believed In Magic
On making what is in the way the way.
IT’S LIVE! PRE-ORDER MY 2026 POSTCARD CALENDAR NOW! FREE SHIPPING ON US PREORDERS- SHIPS IN EARLY NOVEMBER.
I’ve always believed in magic. I’ve seen a seed the size of my thumbnail grow into a sunflower that towers over me with a cosmic spiral of enough new seeds to fill my whole yard with that glory-be yellow. I’ve sat with 20,000 people holding a minute of silence in Telluride Colorado, when the roar of a festival evaporated so that we could hear the birds, the river, and the wind together. I’ve known strangers who became lifelong friends because of a song. I’ve always believed in magic, so you can see why I was not especially surprised when soaking in the steamy liminal space of my bathtub last month, that Brigid, goddess of poetry, healing, and craft, who dwells in sacred springs across the Atlantic, somehow made her way through the rusty old Wilder, VT pipes to speak to me through the water and gift me a graceful solution to an obstacle in my way.
See, I used to do a monthly mini linocut print club, which evolved into a yearly postcard calendar idea, which remained an idea for a few years because I thought it had to be hand-printed, and, well, that is a really big hand-printing project. Last year, I gave myself permission to change the rule that I alone had imposed on myself, took my favorite digital drawings from my newsletter illustrations, and made it happen. Ta-da!
It got me over the “JUST MAKE IT” block that I had with the calendar project, but this year, I really didn’t want to make digital images. There’s an aliveness to art that is made with hands in the real world that digital can just never do, and while I do some drawing and planning with my iPad, I wanted the work to live and breathe in the here and now. But…
We’re rebuilding a collapsing garage on our property, and that means I moved out of the printmaking studio to save money, and my home workshop is a storage space right now for all the things that were in said collapsing garage. Printing isn’t an option.
I ALSO had a large pile of my unsold prints that I had brought back from the studio that I didn’t really have any good space for.
Prints are like twins. They are very similar, but each print I pull is its own self. These weren’t cast-offs. I’d held high hopes for each of them. Most of their sisters and brothers sold, but I admittedly lean on the “creating” side of work and struggle with the “getting it out there” side of the work. (Like every other artist I have ever known.) So there they were, covering my desk in my office, reminding me of the hours I spent making them and the materials I invested, and my failure to see them off to a home in the world. I had been hoping they would just miraculously sell, but I am learning that is not how miracles work.
I was in that bathtub, sitting in water, which has long been known to fuel the muse, thinking of all this, the prints, magic, the calendar this year, how futile it is to try to untangle art from survival, and I really think it was Brigid who came to me, mixing her water and her heat into steam. Who rose up around me and whispered, “Cut them.”
Cut them. Let go and cut into all the old labor. Deconstruct what you’ve made before. Get to the raw nerve, and listen. Ask what I need. Ask what the world needs. Let necessity be a source of power.
“The idea of redemption is always good news, even if it means sacrifice.”
- Patti Smith
So this is where I have been for a couple of weeks now, standing in the middle of piles of chopped-up woodcuts and linocuts, reducing them to colors and textures, and going into a childlike trance with the scissors and the glue stick as they emerge into a new series of collages that have become this year’s postcard calendar. Relief printing already has a quality of revelation to it. I’m cutting right into that and telling new stories with the tools I learned to use in elementary school, before I learned to judge my work. I can’t be precise or impressive here, so it is more about intuition and what my hands want to do.
Isn’t it funny how music is always called playing while art is called work?
I think I produced some art play.
I’ve always believed in magic.
PREORDER NOW! The calendar is both an unbound calendar and a postcard pack, as you can cut off the art and send it as a postcard to someone you love in the real world at the end of the month. It’s a practice of connection. My Mom says they make great gifts!
IT’S LIVE! PRE-ORDER MY 2026 POSTCARD CALENDAR NOW! FREE SHIPPING ON US PREORDERS- SHIPS IN EARLY NOVEMBER.
Beautiful!