An Oasis, While I Pack
An Oasis, While I Pack
This week, the sketchbook is all oasis. Lush, green, almost overgrown — pages where I keep asking which color comes forward and which one steps back, where I'm slipping in a shade that doesn't quite belong on purpose to see if the page can hold it. I haven't been this preoccupied with abundance in a long time.
The funny part is that I'm doing it while I pack.
We're moving in a few weeks. Leaving the studio I've loved — the one I built around how I actually work — into a rental that doesn't have a proper studio at all. Smaller. Tighter. A whole different shape for the same practice. I've been here long enough that even the way the light falls on the wall by 4 p.m. is part of how I make decisions.
So the timing of this obsession isn't lost on me. I'm painting an oasis while I'm being asked to make myself smaller. I want to start something big — there's a piece on the back wall I keep walking past and almost starting, and instead I'm sketchbook-deep in greenery and color theory, taping up boxes around the easel.
Maybe that's the work right now. The sketchbook is the version that fits.
I just did a small festival last weekend — for the first time in a while, standing in front of people who came to look. It was the kind of day that recalibrates you. Someone mentioned a painting from years ago, then pointed to a piece on the wall that night, and I realized, almost embarrassingly out loud, that there's a thread running all the way through. I haven't been wandering. I've been deepening. I've changed, the work has changed, but the thing underneath is the same thing it always was.
I think that's what's letting me sit in the sketchbook this month instead of panicking that I'm not producing. The thread is intact. Whether I'm in this studio or a corner of a smaller house, the same person is doing the looking.
And — quite honestly — the end of the school year is its own weather system. Field days and recitals and a hundred logistics. The studio time I do get is narrow and not always at the right hour. So the sketchbook is doubling as the only place big enough for the kind of thinking I want to do and small enough to actually fit the week.
If you follow along on Instagram, you've probably been seeing some of these oasis pages — usually photographed when I should be answering an email. That's the most public version of where I am right now.
And one quieter note: the Studies from the Studio cutoff for May is the 20th. This month's print is a study from a series of flower bouquets — one I tried to scale up for a festival this spring and couldn't. The letter that comes with it is about why. About not bullying creativity into performing on someone else's timeline. Which is, quite honestly, the same lesson I'm sitting in again this week — the oasis pages, the boxes, the smaller space coming. Different shape, same thing. If you've been hovering on it, this is a good month to come in on.
Back next week with whatever survives the boxes.
— Shelby
