Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

Week one of isolation is coming to a close in our household.  Ryan has been on administrative leave from his job but also remains on call as needed.  Same for the week ahead.  And the week after that.  Maybe longer but who knows, right now.  I am trying to work as usual but can't focus on much for very long, so the days feel choppy and lengthy both, in a weird way.  I keep forgetting about the pandemic for brief periods of time, then remembering with a jolt akin to seasickness.  Turning to books still isn't working for me, but I keep trying.  A list of what I've picked up and put back down, in the last two weeks:

Spirit of Place - Laurence Durrell
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
Autobiography - Morrissey
Songs of Unreason - Jim Harrison
The Diary of Virginia Woolf (found all five volumes)
The Early Diary of Frances Burney
Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad - Austin Kleon

I got 49 pages in with Durrell, 14 pages in with Marcus Aurelius, 47 pages with Morrissey, skipped around in Harrison before deciding not to continue, made headway in zero pages with Woolf, and started where I left off some months ago on page lxxxvii in the interminable preface of the Fanny Burney set.  Austin Kleon's book is the only thing I might actually finish this week (Workman 2019).  I'm on page 135 and am finding it most helpful.  It is exactly what he says it is, a guide to working on your art, in any form it takes, no matter what.  It's not too heavy but at the same time has a terrific big-picture vibe that is appropriately doomy.

Up next I have a copy of art critic Jerry Saltz's brand new book How to Be an Artist (Riverhead 2020), and I'm looking forward to being able to attempt to concentrate on it sometime soon.  I could say the same about my own art practice.  Oil painting is not happening for me right now.  I keep picking things up in my studio and putting them right back down again.  The one project I do seem to be able to make headway with is the little gouache illustrated book I started making last winter.  I set it aside after a few months and it's been dormant since then.  I decided to look at it again and see what I could do.  This week so far I've made a number of gouache paintings, written a few pages of possible text - each page only has a few words on it, but hey, I'll take them - and interleaved most of them into my existing manuscript.  Here are a few of the paintings, on bristol board.  They are quite small:


Making one at a time, in short stints, is working for me, and I feel so grateful!  Animals, birds, natural things like leaves and feathers, landscapes real and imagined - these are what show up and they help reaffirm my love of the natural world.  Everything goes into mylar page protecters in a big three-ring binder, and the whole thing is starting to feel really good and book-like, when I flip through it.  Some places need more illustrations and others need more words, but it's 90% done, I think.  About a hundred pages, a gentle manifesto about the seasons and my beliefs.  Yay me.

My other book, the long wordy one, sits the way my empty canvases do, waiting for me to settle enough to focus on them for long stretches of time.  Time I have, focus I do not.  So I will keep on with the small work and let the rest be, for a while.  Normal life feels like a wonderful dream.  Meanwhile we take it day-to-day and count our blessings, here at home.  The routine I have is a good one.  Early morning yoga, a shower (still with my hand in a plastic bag because of my finger, which is healing up), breakfast.  Morning work inside, and when the sun is warm, morning work outside in the yard and garden.  Lunch, then a long walk with Ryan.  We are going three to five miles a day.  Then afternoon work, and some quiet time outside again before sunset.  An evening meal of sorts, keeping it light, then books I pick up and put back down, and videos we watch together.  All this is interspersed with news, email, phone calls, and conversations with our neighbors out in the street, from safe distances.  Only a few cases of the virus have been documented in our community, but state authorities assure us there are more that haven't been.  And many more in nearby cities and towns.  We stay apart to protect ourselves and others.  Please do the same, whenever possible.  Let the storm pass by, while we shelter from it.  And protect the helpers, those living and working in the epicenters, who cannot shelter.  Good prayers, for every day.