Groundbreaking
We swung a sledgehammer into a bedroom wall together, and I got to go first — just the two of us — and the first crack of drywall giving way felt better than anything I've broken on purpose in years. Somebody's got the clip: two of us, zero good form, one extremely satisfying noise.
That was the groundbreaking for the house and studio we've been designing for the better part of eighteen months now. Current target completion, if the schedule holds: January 1, 2028. I've said that number out loud to a few people this week and watched their eyebrows go up in real time. It's the longest thing I've ever put my name on — longer than any series, longer than any stretch of festival seasons back to back.
Patience has never really been asked of me the way this project is asking for it. I'm used to making things happen at the speed of my own hand. A painting is finished when I decide it's finished. A booth gets built and struck in the same weekend. A print ships on the 30th because that's the date I picked. This has its own timeline — permits, concrete cure times, other people's schedules — and none of it moves faster because I want it to.
What's actually interesting, quite honestly, is what the slowness is doing to the rest of how I think. Eighteen months in, I've had real time to sit with what I want this space to hold, not just the first version that sounded good in an early meeting. Where I think the energy of this business is going five years out, not five months out. Whether a room needs to look finished right now or just needs to be true to how we'll actually use it later. A faster build wouldn't have left room to keep changing my mind about any of that, and I have, more than once.
It's an odd thing to notice how much this mirrors the smaller version of the same lesson back at the easel. Everything in the culture right now is built to arrive instantly — the answer, the order, the take — and I live inside that pull the same as anyone. But the work I actually trust, the pieces with something real in them, are always the ones I didn't rush. This week that's meant getting back into the studio and warming up on palms. Not because they're new to me — they're about as familiar as a subject gets — but because painting something I already know how to see is what's letting me find a slightly different way of seeing it. The comfort is doing the work the unfamiliar usually does.
If you follow along on Instagram, you've probably already seen the sledgehammer clip, poor form and all. It felt like the right kind of chaos to show, next to a project that's otherwise mostly paperwork right now.
I don't have a tidy lesson to end on. Just a long timeline, two people with bad swing mechanics, and a stack of palm studies I'm slowly warming back up to. This month's Studies from the Studio print shipped the 30th — a much smaller, much faster project than this one, and somehow teaching me the same thing.
Back next week with whatever's still standing.
— Shelby
