An Artist Residency Can Be a Time Capsule

With inspiration from Carson Ellis

A couple nights ago, I went to Powell’s and saw the amazing

Carson Ellis

talk about her new book, One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary. Carson’s a beloved local illustrator whose work will fill you with wonder, so definitely go look at it right here.

In her bio on the back of the book, she’s described, in part, as the illustrator-in-residence for her husband

Colin Meloy

’s band, The Decemberists. So you can probably see where I’m going with this!

(Not, as you might suppose, into the idea of appointing yourself the artist-in-residence of a band, any band, even bands with whom you have no marital ties, but I do think that’s an amazing idea too, and if anyone out there wants to be the unofficial artist in residence of their favorite band, I want to hear about it!)

No, this is about Carson’s new book, which is itself a fantastic source of inspiration for your own self-appointed artist residency. The book came about spontaneously, almost by accident, and it was made entirely out of the quotidian, even trivial scraps of everyday life.

A painting from my everyday life: Just walking across Burnside, contemplating pizza

In 2001, when she was twenty-five and new to Portland, Carson kept a journal for one week. Each morning, she would sit down and write everything she could remember about what she’d done the day before, from the minute she woke up until she fell asleep. She did this as a memory exercise: at the ripe old age of 25, she thought her memory could use some improvement.

The writing is somehow wonderful in its banality. She made no effort to write sparking prose, add fascinating insights, or express deep emotion. But there is a sense of purpose in the pages: the writing is the way it is for a reason. She was challenging herself to get down as many details as she could. Here are the first few lines:

I woke up at Colin and Stiv’s around nine. Colin asked me to put on the folk anthology and I did. I set up a new email account on Yahoo. I called Matt and he said he’d call me back in a couple of hours, but he never did. Stiv asked me to turn off the folk anthology and I did. I had cereal and bananas for breakfast and then came up here to work on my new house.

If I’m writing about my everyday life, there’s going to be some soup.

It’s actually a fun read, because there are adventures and mishaps of the sort that broke twenty-somethings tend to have. And we know how the story turns out: she’s about to start dating that guy, and they’re going to get married and have kids and do incredible things, and that makes it all the more meaningful.

When she found those pages in a box in 2020, she didn’t remember writing them at all (so much for memory exercises!) but she thought they were a wonderful time capsule into another era—a pre-digital era, pre-marriage, pre-kids, pre-successful career. Also, even though she arrived in Portland at a time when everyone was lamenting the demise of “old Portland,” she read these pages and felt nostalgic for her own old Portland.

My version of old/not old Portland

So she rounded up whatever images she could find from those days, made a series of paintings, and the result is this book. It is a fantastic example of being the artist-in-residence of your own life! Consider:

• The time period is short. One week.

• The project is defined: Every morning, sit down and write down everything that happened the day before, in order. Don’t get fancy. Just record. You’re an observer, that’s all.

• Then, (now or later) make some illustrations! Or take some photos. Or whatever you do. Make some art to go along with it.

It would be easy to read Carson’s book and think that your life is not nearly so interesting as hers was. Maybe you are not 25 and living in a drafty old warehouse, making art and trying stuff and surviving off cheap beer and leftover pizza that your friend brings home from work.

But you know what? Twenty years from now, your life will look very interesting to you. A hundred years from now, it will be riveting for your great-grandchildren. And right now? It would be interesting to other people. Admit it: you’d love to read someone else’s weekly diary and page through their illustrations. What do we all get up to every day, anyway?

outside my front door in the winter

As I stood in line at Powell’s to get my book signed, everybody else in line was all fired up about this idea. The woman next to me said, “I’m 25 right now and I want to do this.”

“Oh, you have to do it!” I told her.

So I floated home, all excited to tell you about this idea.

Then, the next morning,

Andy J. Pizza

dropped his latest podcast, and it was an interview with Carson (go check that out right here). He said that it would be such an interesting project to mine your past for a moment in time like that, and make art about it.

And that’s another great way to be the artist-in-residence of your own life. Here again, the project is so beautifully well-defined:

• Choose a moment in the past: a family vacation, a hilarious-in-hindsight disaster or mishap, some epic or not-so-epic moment that deserves further exploration.

• Gather photos, look through diaries or old emails if you have them, and ask the other people who were involved what they can share.

• Write it all down, everything you know. Deliberately don’t make it fancy. Could be lists, quotes, a timeline, whatever. Just be a historian of that thing.

• Make some art about it, maybe from photos, maybe from cobbled-together reference images, whatever you can drum up.

I immediately thought of a Super 8 video I made of a big Thanksgiving gathering in about 1990. I’ve had it transferred to digital and many people in my family have copies. It was such a happy gathering, with lots of singing and silliness. Some of the people in that video are no longer with us, and I miss them desperately, and they deserve to be memorialized as they were in that moment, happy and surrounded by people they love. The rest of us are still around, but older. Back then, we didn’t know how life was going to turn out for us, and now we do, more or less. That version of us deserves to be remembered, too.

That’s what I would do. I would be the artist-in-residence of my family’s Thanksgiving thirty years ago. What about you?

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Supporters are getting some perspective

I love talking about the “what” and “why” of a self-appointed artist residency, but for supporters of this here project, we’re looking at the “how.” If you want to make art, but you need a little nudge, you’ll get a weekly video in your in-box on a topic suggested by you or one of your co-conspirators in this endeavor. We do a lot of other things too—some live Zooms, some chats, some giveaways, etc.

A lot of people have asked for help with perspective, so we’re diving into that for a few weeks. And there’s a whole library of past videos you can check out here.

For the price of a couple pencils, you can join us! See you there.

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The Bit at the End

Here’s a fun podcast interview I just did with Joe Lamp’l about my new book.

Order signed copies of my new book, The Tree Collectors, from Broadway Books here in Portland.

Come find me on Instagram, or see paintings for sale- Right here

Order signed copies of some of my books from my husband’s bookstore, or order my books and many books I love at Bookshop.org

Take one of my online writing or art classes here

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