Reading · Intuitive Drawing

Intuitive Drawing is a weekly newsletter about creative work and being human. As always, take what you need and leave the rest.

My friends, this week I am reviving a newsletter from August 20th, 2025. I’ve been traveling and as I head out on my last little trip of the summer, I want to leave you with these words that resonate with me again right now. I promised another newsletter about rule-breaking, but that will have to wait until next week.

Mentally, I’m here?

Dear friends,

This week feels like the dregs of summer. My sister’s kids are back in school on the other coast already. Our kids go back just before and after Labor Day. I’m going camping, and I feel a little like a jerk telling you that because I have traveled so much this summer. Do I have any savings? No. Have I made much money this year? Also no.

However, I have been enjoying this time.

There is a lot of privilege that has supported my summer. I am grateful for my opportunities and my networks, and I try not to take them for granted. Right now feels like a surreal stage of life, and it’s hard to remember to ground into where I am in the journey.

My son is 11, and I feel like I am traversing some space between constant scrambling for childcare and the ease of having a kid who can be left at home alone for a couple of hours. I can see him needing me less, and can sense the near possibility of him not wanting to play LEGOs with me at all anymore. I am taking this summer, with its family trips, and its very pleasurable work trips in stride. The last 11 years of having a kid rule my summer time is shifting.

My stepsons are almost the same age, 11 and 12, and my stepdaughter feels like she’s moved out already at 16.

2017 was sometime between two hours and 20 years ago.

I titled this newsletter woolgathering, thinking I might praise the act of daydreaming, of not knowing, of incubating before you create. But as I write about this life stage of parenting, I wonder how the two relate. How is traveling and parenting a tween like woolgathering? Is there something in the in-between?

I love Lone Fir Cemetery and stopped there twice this week to kill time. Did you know it’s also an arboretum? Look at this perfect, ancient-looking Japanese Maple. What do you do with the in-between moments when you don’t have enough time to run another errand, but you do have enough time to walk around a cemetery?

I have a bunch of little pots on my back burners: upcoming classes at the studio, murals, the 2026 calendar, maybe an event to celebrate my Oracle Deck. I’ve been meeting and planning this week, and it feels like I’m gathering something. The children sleep in, make themselves ramen, and ask me if they can have another popsicle. Nicky needs me to help him find a LEGO. There are drawings and LEGOs and dirty socks everywhere. They leave me to my Zoom meetings and email writing. I think I am getting somewhere. Are we all woolgathering?

*Sonder: the realization that everyone else’s lives are as complex and unknowable as our own. -* Some postcards I drew in 2017, including the text from The Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig, a compendium of invented words, intended to fill the holes in the English language. Somehow, this words feels apt for this email.

Although I often feel I have no answers, and that can feel overwhelming, this week I recognize that feeling, and it seems a little more peaceful. As I prepare to go camping for three nights with just one kid, I reassure myself that I don’t have to know. I will forget something, and hopefully it’s not a sleeping bag or a reply to an email about a big job. I will come out the other side and start these projects, these little pots on my back burners, and school will resume, and life will go on.

This week, I leave you in praise of the in-between stages, of not knowing, incubating, daydreaming, and woolgathering.

Until next time, much love, Lettie JaneMuch love, Lettie Jane

Classes

Deeper Drawing (Saturday afternoons) Sept-Oct Saturdays, August 29th - October 3rd (6 classes) 1:30pm – 4:30pm
Intro To Experimental Watercolor Saturdays, October 24th - December 5th, NO CLASS November 14th (6 classes) 2:00pm – 5:00pm
Intro To Expressive Figure Drawing Saturdays, October 24th - December 5th, NO CLASS November 14th (6 classes) 10:00am – 1:00pm

Tidbits

Somehow already the end of Leo Season? How about that eclipse last Wednesday???
I loved the Art 21 video by Lenka Clayton “Human Nature.” She talks about having an Artist Residency in Motherhood.
I read Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill. The blurbs across the back and front of the book don’t mention what happens in the marriage, and perhaps it would ruin it to say so, but the husband has an affair. The prose is poetic, sometimes obtuse, sometimes stark. I found myself page turning, gut wrenching, and emotionally invested, as our protagonist, at times “the wife,” at other times, “I” threads together a story around my greatest fear: betrayal.

Happy Birthday To… (Artist of the Week)

Francis Alÿs was born August 22nd, 1959.

Francis Alÿs *Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing)* (1997) video & performance for which Alÿs pushed a block of ice around the streets of Mexico City until all he had to show for his efforts was a rapidly drying water mark of the pavement.

I am interested in seeing how a certain situation can develop with potential accidents. First, I am inspired by the acts of potential collaborators. It tends to be an action they have already done in a different context. I am very clear about the rules of the game, but once it's launched, I don't intervene at all. —Francis Alÿs

Francis Alÿs, The Green Line, 2004 — Francis Alÿs *The Green Line* 2004 video and performance, Alÿs walked “the green line” traced on the map between Jerusalem and Palestine in 1948, carrying a can of green paint and leaving a thin green line in his wake.

Can that make any sense - a Belgian artist living in Mexico and working in Afghanistan?—Francis Alÿs

When Faith Moves Mountains (Francis Alÿs, 2002) — Francis Alÿs *When Faith Moves Mountains* 2002, video and performance. Five hundred Peruvian volunteers displaced a mountain of sand by a few centimeters. The performance took place on the 11th of April 2002 as part of the third Ibero-American Biennial of Lima.

I got to see Alÿs’ 7 Walks in London in 2005. I walked into a gallery, filled with photos and a map showing the visitors how to participate in the piece by walking a certain route. I loved performing a walk with the intention of making art, to feel like the world was some how altered, deepened, given meaning.

Art Shows

If you missed seeing my coaster in person at Nucleus’s Coaster show, you can still buy them online here.

Find my Enya piece at the next LP Show at Albina Press, Saturday, September 26th.

Etc.

August book club: Walk Through Walls: A Memoir by Marina Abramović
September book club: Art Is Life by Jerry Saltz
October book club: The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair
November book club: On Color by David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing
LINE TIME is a tiny recorded class whenever you need it.

Ways to Bring My Work Into Your Home

The Bun Update is behind a paywall, so I can reward you kind folks who send money my way. If you need the bun content, but can’t afford another subscription, don’t hesitate to reach out and ask.

Woolgathering (Reprise)

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