IN THE STUDIO | February Round-Up

What a month. February came in with a tiny little whisper and left screaming its face off. As I sit here in the studio, the rain is pouring down, it feels like February is taking a really intense shower, washing itself clean for the March that is about to roll in.

I talk a lot about weather, seasons, and the rhythms of life. It feels at the core of who I am. Not just because we on the East Coast of the US, particularly in the Mid-Atlantic, experience the seasons pretty evenly throughout the year but because the cyanotype process is so intertwined with them. I often wonder which came first, my love of seasons and then my love of the cyanotype or vise versa?

The Round-Up this month is pretty simple because I spent nearly the entire month filming and editing my next SKILLSHARE class.

I spent a ton of time in the snow for said class and only managed to read one book (but man, was it a good one!)

1. For those of you that are new to Skillshare, it is an online learning platform that houses short educational videos primarily about art, design and home (although there are some exceptions.) I created my first ever online class for Skillshare back in September where I showed everyone how to create a cyanotype. This time, I wanted to created a class all about finding winter inspiration. I couldn’t do this without the genius filming and lighting help of Liam and Heather Lieberman of Pennwood Pictures. They are dear friends and work magic getting everything set. I am going to show you lots of behind the scenes and tell you more about filming in a post in March. For now, go check out the class and let me know what you think!

2. I read The Four Winds this month and it was just fantastic. I have fallen in love with Kristin Hannah and her writing style. She is a magician at story-telling. I first read The Nightingale, which I loved but I had been reading a lot of WWII fiction and I was getting them confused! Then The Great Alone about Alaska in the 60’s which I think it might be up there with Where the Crawdad’s Sing (which is my favorite novel of all time.) The Four Winds is about the Dust Bowl in Texas and California and a Mother’s quest to keep her family alive after tragedy hits her multiple times. It is descriptive, poetic, moving and a bit sad. Truly a work of art.

3. The last thing I’ll mention in this month’s round-up is about reconnecting to that place in our creative lives that takes you to another place — you know that space where you lose track of time? Honestly, I don’t feel this very often. Distraction is real. Phones and websites and emails and texts and family and caring for our loved ones and…are a real thing and it is hard to really focus and harder to focus to a point that you get LOST in the creative act. This happened for me while creating my Skillshare class. It was the first time I had ever edited my own video. I thought I would hate it and that it would fall on the list of things I would eventually outsource. But it was quite the opposite. I loved it. I got so lost in it that one evening, as I was editing, John next to me in the studio doing his thing, said, “Sarah, I haven’t seen you that focused in a long time!” which got me thinking about all of the ways we lose ourselves in our art practice and how I will be paying closer attention to that space as I move into March.

Cheers to you all. Wishing you a lovely week ahead.

xoxo Sarah