Hello Starlings,

Today I’m opening the first round of something new: the Creative Court Report.

It’s a bespoke written astrology reading for people who make things with their hands (painters, drawers, ceramicists, print-makers, textile artists, anyone whose work lives in materials) and for those of you who keep circling that kind of making without quite letting yourself begin.

It exists to answer one question that your astrological chart is unusually good at answering: how does your creative process actually work, so you can stop fighting yourself and build a practice you can actually return to.

If you read my last letter, then you know this work grew out of months of studying the astrology charts of painters and other physical makers, trying to understand not fame or career in the abstract, but practice. The actual mechanics of making. What helps someone keep showing up. What tangles them. What kinds of rhythms, frictions, contradictions, material instincts, and bodily conditions shape the life of the studio.

That is what this report is for.

This report will not answer if you are talented, if you can make this a career, if you will become famous, or if you are a “real” artist (I am suspicious of any framework that tries to separate “real artists” from everyone else for so many reasons).

Instead, it asks the questions that actually matter when the work has gone quiet or life has gotten hard:

• How do I actually make?

• Why do I keep freezing, abandoning, or second-guessing myself?

• What part of my process is truly mine, and what part have I borrowed from someone else’s idea of seriousness?

• What does my body need in order to keep creating?

Commission Your Creative Court Report

Rather than describe the report, let me show you the kind of story that unfolds within it.

Because Mercury is currently retrograde, it feels right to begin with the first member of the Creative Court: Mercury.

Meet Mercury: Every craft in which the Intellect is joined with the Hand

I’ve been thinking about Mercury a great deal lately, in part because Mercury retrograde is often a time of returning. Returning to old methods, old questions, old frustrations, old studies. Going back over what we thought we understood and realizing there is more there. Or noticing, with some humility, that we may have built an entire process on an assumption that was never really true for us in the first place.

Mercury matters quite a lot when we are speaking about physical making.

In modern astrology, Mercury gets flattened so often into intellect, language, communication, analysis. Which is not wrong, exactly. But it is incomplete.

In traditional astrology, Mercury is also deeply involved in craft.

Al-Biruni describes Mercury as the ruler of “every craft in which the intellect is joined with the hand.”

Vettius Valens also described Mercury as governor of “displays of skill” and the fine, intricate movements of the hands.

These phrases have stayed with me because they name something precise about physical making.

Painters, sculptors, printmakers, textile artists, ceramicists, florists—so many forms of making depend upon the hands and arms. Upon the strange and intimate coordination between perception and pressure, between vision and dexterity, between what you sense inwardly and what your body can actually do with the materials in front of it.

In Abu Ma’shar’s philosophy, the soul’s deepest desires and thoughts are invisible, existing in some abstract airy place. Mercury’s sacred task is to take these unformed, silent thoughts and physically actualize them in the material world.

Mercury is the spirit who dances between the threshold of idea and tangible reality.

As Valens put it, Mercury’s role is to make the hands “clever.” The relationship you have with Mercury is the difference between a hand that merely holds a tool and a hand that knows exactly how to make that tool dance.

Mercury is not only the one who learns the craft, but they are the one who helps translate it. They show us something about method, hand-eye coordination, technical intelligence, problem-solving, adaptation, and the little flashes of workaround ingenuity that let a person keep making when the obvious route is blocked.

When the “proper” method feels dead in the hands

I have been thinking about this especially hard because my own method is something I more or less had to pioneer for myself.

And what interests me is not simply that my chart shows that in some abstract way. It is that my chart shows, with uncomfortable precision, the contradiction between what I thought I ought to do and what actually works for me.

They happen when a person is trying to work through methods that do not belong to their own craft-intelligence.

That was certainly true for me.

I have a very strong Saturn, and because it is in Capricorn, there is a part of me that genuinely admires rigor, tradition, seriousness, and the kinds of exacting methods that look beautifully built from the outside. I am impressed by highly disciplined work, meticulous work. The kind of painting that takes hundreds of hours and seems to have passed through an immense gate of technical correctness.

And if I put my mind to it, I can make things that way.

But the truth is that I do not enjoy it enough to build a living practice around it.

That distinction is key in a creative practice.

When I first tried to return to painting as an adult, I assumed I needed to learn the “right” way. I went through vigorous classes. I tried to do things in respectable sequence. I thought that if I could just submit myself to the proper discipline, then perhaps I could become the kind of artist I believed I should be.

What I found instead was frustration.

Could I imitate what was being taught? Yes. Could I get results that looked competent? Yes.

Did I enjoy the process? Not at all. Did it make me want to come back the next day? No.

And for a while that was devastating, because I mistook that deadness for incapacity.

By some grace, the truth was much kinder and more nuanced than that.

Because alongside all of that pressure toward correctness, there was another reality: my body could no longer tolerate the medium I loved most. I had been an oil painter as a teenager, but as an adult I cannot be around solvents, and even “natural alternatives” cause problems for me. And beyond the chemistry of it, oil painting asks for a kind of domestic stability and spatial ease that my life has not had.

So there I was, pulled in several directions at once.

A part of me wanted rigor, tradition, and proper pathways.

My body was saying no to the medium I had originally mastered.

And my Mercury—which is retrograde, in a Saturn sign, and in a catalytic relationship with a rather unruly Mars—was not especially interested in playing by the rules.

That last part turned out to matter quite a lot.

Unable to tolerate oil paints or solvents, I have pioneered a water-based mixed-media method using watercolor, gouache, and thickening mediums to create depth, body, and texture. I work with cloth, knives, and stiff brushes, wiping paint in and out of the surface until the image begins to emerge physically, almost as if I am conjuring the weather onto the surface.

It is completely at odds with the way watercolor is usually taught.

And because Mercury retrograde does have a way of moving backwards, I often discovered things by instinct first and only later turned around to understand them. I would stumble into a process or a tool combination that gave me the result I wanted, and only afterward go back and research what exactly I had done.

It is indirect. Idiosyncratic. Utterly heretical.

It is also the first thing that really worked.

Not just in the sense that the paintings became stronger, though they did. More importantly, I actually wanted to keep doing it. I returned to it because it felt alive.

In fact, it is a bit like child-like play, or being a mad scientist. It felt like something in me and something in the materials had finally stopped arguing long enough to learn how to dance together.

What this looks like in my studio right now

This same pattern is showing up for me again even now.

The past couple of weeks I’ve been a bit in a funk. I haven’t felt well, and I also got too far into my head around painting (a Mercury issue!). Which is usually a sign that I need a bridge back into the work rather than more pressure.

For me, that bridge has often been charcoal.

Not drawing in the conventional sense. I don’t get much life from highly constructed graphite drawing or atelier-style exercises, even though I can do them. Drawing that way feels too rigid and technical in my hands, making me squirm and want to run away.

Painting, for me, is much more… immediate and somatic. More atmospheric. More about shape, tone, and slowly finding the image from a larger field and helping it emerge.

Charcoal lets me work that way.

I can mass in tone first, erase back into it, sand passages down, layer thickly on top… Extremely similar to the way in which I paint, rather than like a precise drawing instrument. Even in charcoal, I am still working in a way that is slightly sideways, building the image through atmosphere and revision rather than through tidy construction.

These sketches from the weekend are a good example of that.

That, to me, is also Mercury.

Not just skill in the abstract, but the hand finding its own route. The hand discovering which tools and methods actually let it think and problem-solve actively, through practice.

This is exactly the kind of pattern the Creative Court Report maps — details and founding pricing below, or commission yours here.

When the problem is not discipline, but fit

I suspect many of you know this feeling, even if you have never named it this way.

You may be someone who can follow the method and still feel dead in your hands.

You may be someone who keeps buying classes or tools or systems that look beautiful from the outside, only to abandon them once you try to live inside them.

You may be someone whose best work appears only after you stop trying to be proper and begin improvising.

You may be someone with a body, schedule, budget, or life situation that does not permit the idealized version of an artist’s process, and so you keep wondering whether that disqualifies you.

I do not think it does.

I think very often what we call inconsistency, lack of discipline, or doing it wrong is actually a mismatch between the method we are trying to use and the way our own craft-intelligence moves.

Within this, Mercury tells us something about how the hand actively problem solves…

• How it adapts to the body’s limits.

• How it negotiates with materials.

• How it finds another route when the obvious one is closed.

• How it carries an image from the inward world into contact with the earth.

And because these contradictions are so specific from chart to chart, this is exactly the kind of thing a bespoke report can clarify in a way generic advice usually cannot.

One person’s Mercury may need order, precision, and slow technical repetition. Another may need mess, experimentation, and room to discover backwards. One person may be fighting a standard that belongs to Saturn. Another may be dealing with a Mars that rushes the hand before the technique is ready. Another may have a beautiful eye and genuine devotion, but need practical support around the body’s rhythms before the work can become consistent.

What the Creative Court Report is meant to clarify

This is the kind of terrain the Creative Court Report is meant to illuminate.

Each report is a custom written PDF where I look closely at the four immediate Creative Court members most involved in physical making (Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the Moon) and the way they cooperate, contradict, compensate, or fall out of rhythm in your chart.

The report is designed to help you understand your process with more precision and more curiosity, so you can stop wasting energy trying to perform someone else’s seriousness and begin building a practice that is more workable, more sustainable, and more truly your own.

If you’ve been calling it a discipline problem, it might be a fit problem. That’s what this report is for.

Once you commission a report, I’ll ask for your birth date, time, and place (if your birth time is unknown or fuzzy, there’s still meaningful work we can do!).

You’ll also be sent a short questionnaire about your creative practice. After I receive your questionnaire back, your written report will be sent to you as a PDF within two weeks.

I’m opening 25 reports at a founding rate of $197.

This first round is priced lower because you’re helping me refine the form. After these 25, the report moves to its standard price of $247.

Commission Your Creative Court Report

I’ll be writing more about each of these planets, because there is still so much more to say about the multi-layered reality of being a physical creator, full of contradictions, revelations, and hidden gifts.

But today I wanted to begin here:

with Mercury as the clever hand,
the translator,
the workaround artist,
the clever trickster that figures out how to keep making even when the first road closes.

From my paint-soaked heart to yours,