Three fantastic artist-in-residence ideas
Geology, garden centers, and your neighbors
Grahame Hurd-Wood is painting every resident of his English village
In 2013, a painter in Pembrokeshire, in southwest Wales, had an idea to paint portraits of everyone in his village. There are only 1800 residents in St. Davids, making it the UK’s smallest city, but that’s still a daunting number of portraits to paint.
Grahame Hurd-Wood was 55 at the time. He’d been painting his friends for a while already. “I’d got to a hundred,” he told the BBC, “and I thought, well, if I can get to a hundred, I can get to a thousand. And if I can get to a thousand, why not paint the city of St. Davids?”1
Ten years later, he’d painted a thousand portraits and expanded the boundaries of his project to include people who live in the surrounding countryside. Some of his sitters have died or moved away. New people move in. Babies are born. He keeps painting.
It’s a small but monumental achievement, one that speaks to the power of a simple idea and repetition. Make a lot of anything and it will matter.
C.L. Fornari created an artist residency at her local garden center
C.L. Fornari, garden writer and reader of this newsletter, created an artist-in-residence program at her local garden center. While this program does involve an application and some expectations of the artist (unlike a self-appointed artist’s residency) the process seems quite simple, and the idea of spending a few hours a day making art at a garden center sounds so agreeable, that I’m sure they’ll have plenty of applications. If you’re anywhere near Hyannis, MA, you might want to apply. (C.L, I hope you’ll let us know how it goes! I’d love to see what kind of art-making happens.)
Olivia Rafferty is writing songs about geology
This sounds like the sort of thing that I would just say in a post about becoming the artist-in-residence of something: “If you’re a songwriter, why not declare yourself the artist-in-residence of, I don’t know, geology?”
But I did not make it up, it’s a thing that olivia rafferty has done with no prompting from any of us! Yes, she is writing songs about geology, in fact a whole entire glorious album about fossils and tectonic plates and subduction and—oh, it’s so good, you should go read all about it right now. And of course, listen to her music and read the liner notes and subscribe! She’s on a remarkable journey to explore the metaphors that connect geology and human experience, and I am so here for it.
Do you know about a cool self-appointed artist residency?
If you’ve undertaken an artist-in-residency yourself, or you know about one that you think might be fun to share, please tell me about it! I’m also eager to hear from anyone who has completed an actual official artist residency that they want to share. Stay in touch! I love hearing from you.
What are you reading?
If you’re a fan of Katharine White (maybe you loved Onward and Upward in the Garden), or if you’re a fan of her husband, E.B. White, or if you geek out on the weird early history of The New Yorker, or if you love reading about those groundbreaking editors who lavished the kind of attention on their authors that modern writers can only dream of, then you should absolutely read The World She Edited. It’s 592 pages long, something I did not realize because I read the ebook. I kept reading fascinating tidbits aloud to my husband, and this went on for so many evenings that he finally said, “How long IS this book?” It was such a gold mine that I was delighted that it lasted as long as it did.
Meanwhile, supporters are painting birds
We’re continuing a series of bird paintings. We started with pencil drawings, then did ink and watercolor, then watercolor and colored pencil, and now we’re doing gouache. (But if you’re not into gouache, you can do this one in watercolor!)
We’re also scheduling a live Zoom for next week, where we’ll paint many small birds in a very relaxed, casual style.
For just a few bucks a month, you can join us, get these tutorials in your inbox once a week, and support this whole enterprise. You’ll also get access to quite a substantial archive aimed at helping you to do just about anything in a sketchbook. Join us!
The bit at the end
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
“If I can get to a hundred, I can get to a thousand” also happens to be exactly how you write a book or undertake any large project. If you can write a paragraph, you can write a page. If you can write a page, you can write three hundred pages. One at a time.
Hi 👋!
After reading your newsletter, I created a self-appointed artist residency for my dogs' surgery!
My dog, Roxy, had torn both of her back ACLs - rather efficient of her and so we got them fixed both at the same time.
The kicker - she couldn’t use stairs for 8 weeks. We live in a split level that had been split once more for good measure, so I turned our kitchen into a studio apartment and we camped there for EIGHT weeks. I drew every square inch of the kitchen, the dog, and the dishes, and I think it’s the only reason I didn’t go completely mad.
Thank you for pushing this idea out into the world!!
Fantastic thank you Amy x