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Turmeric Anthotypes and beyond
In about 6 weeks, I will be leading a workshop featuring “nature art” at the Oyama Senmaida harvest festival. Last year we explored a variety of ways to get color from plants and earth. This year, something different: anthotypes. (antho, flower + type, print) It’s a fancy word for capturing shadows by sun-bleaching botanical emulsions.…
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Camera Roll
Another couple of months in photos from my Instagram Stories. Week by week the seasons change while daily life remains “same-same but different.” Scroll to see nature (including my best ever photos of a snail and a grasshopper) and art. Always plenty of cats.
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Festival Spider
When my sister read my previous post, she wrote some encouragement to me. Not a classic “you can do it” message, instead it reframed my perception of my role at Kozuka Art Festival. You are the spider of the festival. You have put yourself in a shady spot where there are trees and tenderness to…
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Kozuka Art Festival 2026 (first half)
Art festival in the forest! A magical week full of artists arriving and displaying their wares and their work. Restaurants come to us on a daily rotation. There are performances and impromptu encounters. Workshops, crafts for sale, art on display. It’s very cool. But from my point of view, its been a lonely four days.…
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Inserting My Voice in Art Writing
When I write my workbooks for Drawing Meditations, I make them more like a series of worksheets than a book: spare and succinct with emphasis on instructions over descriptions of the outcome. It clearly reflects how I teach art. My teacher’s instinct is to let the student discover their own path to creative insights. I…
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Creative Fire
My friend Greg and I had a wide-ranging conversation yesterday, centered around a creative question. “How do you decide what to do?” We both have art studios filled with supplies and have enough time to work on our ideas. It can be overwhelming to choose a project, especially with a steady diet of inspirations from…
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Dandelion Color
This week I spent creative time in the shed, making color and paper. It began when I took a walk and gathered dandelions on the roadside of the route between home and Tod’s office. When foraging, I never take everything I see. I am not the only entity using these resources; there are bees, butterflies…
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Five Ideas That I Can’t Do Alone
五つのアイデア、一人ではできない I have been overflowing with project concepts recently – maybe it’s spring, maybe my brain has a burst of good sense for a change – and these five ideas keep coming back to me. I am sharing them here in English and Japanese. 最近、プロジェクトのアイデアがあふれています。春のせいかな、それとも珍しく頭が冴えているのかな。その中でも、五つのアイデアが繰り返し頭に浮かびます。どれも共通するテーマがあります。 These are largely ideas around: Akiya Recycle Village 空家リサイクル村 Let’s…
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A lifetime of weaving
Morita Seki is retiring after 60 years of weaving. She is 92. I saw an article in the Bonichi about her “final exhibition” at a gallery in downtown Tateyama and I had to go to meet her and to see some of her work. By the time I got there on the 20th, day before…
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Triptych Weaving
The creative process led me to creating a trio of small weavings about the creative process, specifically writing: The Blank Page;Concept of a Plan;First Edit. I really only meant to make the one in the middle. I wanted to practice a tapestry joining technique – looping the weft threads of two different colors – to…
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