An honest update

Hello Starlings,

Back in April, I told you that if I wrote here again, it would not be as a brand.

I said it would be under my own name, as a whole person. I meant that then, and I mean it now.

Which means I have to begin with a truth that is rather humbling, but is true all the same.

My family has done everything they can to carry us while I’ve been sick. They have looked for work, taken what they could get, and tried very hard to build a life where I could step away from earning and simply recover.

It has not been enough.

For the past eight years, I have been the primary breadwinner in my family. That reality did not disappear just because my body needed me to stop. Even if stopping is necessary, my family’s material life has not softened around that necessity. We are back in a financially precarious position, which means I need to come back to work in some way while also tending to my body.

So to be entirely transparent, that is one part of why I am here.

The other part has to do with what has happened to me, artistically, since February.

I think I had a fairly romantic idea of what this period of my life would look like in relation to painting. When we moved to the gorgeous Dingle peninsula, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to live out the ideal version of what I thought my creative process would look like. As a landscape painter, I have always wanted to walk the land, spend long stretches of time with it, and let a place work on me slowly until I understand something of its mood and atmosphere well enough to paint from that encounter.

That had been a real part of my process for years. Before my surgery in 2024 (which put me on bedrest for 6 months) I used to go on two to four hour walks nearly every day. It was one of the core ways I met the world.

But the truth is that I have not been able to do that for some time now. And in this current (now going on 6 months) flare-up, I am lucky if I can get out every couple of weeks for even a short walk, with a great deal of sitting and resting involved. My radius has become very small.

As my fellow chronically-ill friend Kristin Mathis puts it, I have been rather bed-tethered. I cannot be too far from my bed, or from a place where I can easily lie down, regulate temperature, and try to steady a body that has become absurdly sensitive to the slightest environmental shift.

Also, when I first arrived here, before the flare forced me into bed for weeks at a time, I was painting the ocean. After five years of being haunted by dreams of crashing waves against cliffs, here I was finally living next to crashing waves against cliffs. Naturally I was drawn to painting these experiences that have shaped my dreams and are now the literal world I find myself a part of.

And yet, despite the ocean being only a 30-minute walk away, the time on bedrest has shifted my focus entirely. I’ve spent the last several months in my studio, making art from bed. My primary view of the world comes from the studio skylight.

A beautiful one.

So while so much of my expected life collapsed inward, another world opened above me.

I have spent an almost absurd amount of time watching weather move through that window. Cloudbanks. Sudden brightness. Storm light. The bruised underbellies of evening. And because this illness is so erratic, sleep is often hard to come by, so I have also had a rather unparalleled view of the night sky. The moon. The stars. That vast black distance pricked through with light.

And somewhere in all of that, I became completely captured by the sky, and it changed my practice.

Looking through that skylight, surprisingly, also brought me back to vigorously studying and practicing astrology.

I believe I am not alone when I say that especially right now, what I need in my spiritual life are practical tools that help me ground into the moment and navigate the life I find myself in. I need spiritual tools that help me understand what is actually happening and how to respond to it with more honesty, more self-acceptance, and more precision.

What I found myself doing, from bed, was looking at the charts of painters and other physical art-makers.

Because my practice is now largely dictated by illness, and because I react with acute sensitivity to the environment around me, my way of making art has become dissident to the popular picture we are often sold of the artist’s life.

Not just because I am often painting in bed. But because I can’t use my medium of choice. Oil paint and solvents cause my body to have severe reactions. Instead, I have had to build a painting practice out of materials used in radical, rebellious, and occasionally downright heretical ways.

I will write more about that in future emails. For now, what matters is that it left me feeling uncategorizable, and for a while, deeply unsure whether I belonged among the artists I admired.

I had spent enough time looking at what other living contemporary artists were doing, and feeling more than a little lonely and insecure. Where do I belong? Landscape artists, at least the ones I admire, spend significant time in the environments they paint. None of these painters use their materials the way I do. Am I doing this all wrong? Does this make me an imposter or less of a “real” artist?

And yet, the art I’ve been making is the best art I’ve ever made as an adult. The more I am committed to my extremely strange idiosyncrasies, the more art I find myself making… and the more satisfying the process is for me. And for the first time in my adult life, I keep consistently returning to it.

Which is what led me down a rabbit hole of research into the astrological charts of painters.

I didn’t start looking at the natal charts of painters because I was interested in the indicators of art being a career (there is no single one!), or the markers of how someone becomes well-known for their art. And not even because I was looking for some tidy signature that would separate “real artists” from everyone else (I am suspicious of any framework that tries to separate “real artists” from everyone else for so many reasons).

I was looking to understand practice. The actual process of physical art-making, and how we find a rhythm that truly empowers our ability to create.

What shows up in the chart when someone is called into a physical relationship with materials over and over again. What kinds of patterns emerge in the lives of people who return to paint, clay, fiber, texture, image, object. What the chart seems to say about rhythm, repetition, friction, appetite, stamina, somatic intelligence, sensory orientation, taste, personal perception, inspiration, and the pursuit to create driven by divine discontent.

Imagine if I had bought into the idea that I’m failing or not a “real” artist because what I do isn’t something I’ve seen in other makers before. Or that whatever artist I might have been under other conditions was not available to me now and I should just stop trying.

Astrology, approached this way, became a corrective to that despair.

Studying the charts of physical art-makers was unexpectedly affirming. Their processes varied enormously, of course. But there were clear and recurring patterns around practice, embodiment, rhythm, friction, taste, sensory life, and the ways a person returns to making. There was far more individual idiosyncrasy than the culture of art instruction seems to allow.

And it helped me look at my own chart with clearer eyes.

It helped me accept, rather than question, my own idiosyncrasies.

In fact, the only differentiation I can find between lifelong artists and those who give up, is that lifelong artists embrace and nurture their idiosyncrasies, rather than fighting them, hiding them, or trying to force themselves into a shape of practice that is not theirs.

I’d even say that what we may label as “wrongness” in our creative lives is often the precise way our creativity actually works.

During my research, this quote from Georgia O’Keeffe kept ringing like a bell:

“I grew up pretty much as everybody else grows up and one day seven years ago found myself saying to myself—I can’t live where I want to—I can’t go where I want to—I can’t do what I want to—I can’t even say what I want to—.

School and things that painters have taught me even keep me from painting as I want to.

I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted as that seemed to be the only thing I could do that didn’t concern anybody but myself that was nobody’s business but my own.”

In my own case, the natal chart only confirmed what hindsight has shown me many times over: I do my best work when I embrace being heretical. When I stop trying to be “proper”. When I stop trying to imitate forms of seriousness that do not belong to me. When I find the live wire in the process and follow it, even if it makes the whole thing look unusual from the outside. When I prioritize somatic desires over what makes logical sense.

These recognitions have been quietly life-giving.

Because what I need from art-making now is not performance, or even some form of escape.

It is comfort. It is sanctuary. It is a way of coming home to my own life while I am still living it.

Astrology has become a tool for helping me continue a physical art-making practice when the world is *waves arms around wildly* more than a bit chaotic and unpredictable.

And after helping friends and family with this framework over the last few months, I think it’s time to share it more broadly.

(To be clear: what this does not mean is a return to the old shape of work that helped drive me into the ground. I’ll be trying on a few new ways of working that allow my sick body to exist without making myself more sick.)

So if it feels fitting that as Mercury retrogrades in my 9th house, bringing old studies and old devotions back across my desk, I find myself returning to astrology too.

More specifically, as an astrologer devoted to helping physical art-makers understand and nurture their creative process.

I’m excited to share more of the framework that I’ve been developing, utilizing astrology as a tool for identifying and honing an art practice. It will be a joy to share this with you next.

So I think that is part of what this space is going to hold now.

Painting and the studio, most certainly. The raw reality of creating, the beauty and warts alike. The weather passing through the skylight, and the enchanting night sky. The strange clarity that enforced stillness can sometimes bring.

And also astrology, in this more practical and grounded form: as a tool of self-recognition, self-acceptance, and understanding our own inner mechanics well enough to free the creative faculties we actually have, rather than wasting our creative lives trying to perform someone else’s process and wondering why it doesn’t work for us.

I’m still operating on chronic-illness time, painting and working from bed. And I will be making some paid offerings out of this work, because I have to feed my family.

That’s how I will show up wholly myself, rather than a polished brand trying to influence you into the image of a life that does not exist.

I hope you’ll continue to walk by my side on this new leg of the journey.