Summary of 2025

I don’t really know how to articulate the depth of change that has happened to me this year. I find it frustrating that while I try to rise above the ripple effects of those changes I keep getting pushed and pulled by those ripples as they spread ever outward.

Not only was my moving to a new home one of those fundamental life changes from most of those infamous lists, but I dove head-first into a new career that I’m still trying to make happen. The stresses of all of it seem insurmountable a lot of the time, and it’s really hard to remain positive. The constant ups-and-downs of optimism vs despair are… exhausting.

I was told a long time ago by many many people that being an artist would mean living a life of insecurity. As a theatre-maker, I worked hard to ensure I wasn’t going to have that kind of life: I decided to hedge my bets and be an educator.

And that worked for a very long time. But eventually, I needed to be my own artist instead of just supporting the growth of students. Turned out I couldn’t do both in my job as an academic at the institution I was at, so I left.

And the churn began. No more guaranteed paycheck. Lost really great health insurance that had to switch to that offered by my husband’s job. I started working for myself in an entirely new field I knew little about: using digital mediums as a studio artist to support myself with my own printed work

On top of that, I also moved to a new home and started producing work in a new style.

So there have been a lot of changes this year. A LOT.

So when I started putting this “retrospective” image together, my “Art Summary” for 2025, I was plunged backwards into assessing what I had created, month-to-month, and how I’d grown accordingly.

And I feel I grew. A LOT.

It started with finding Francis Macdonald McNair’s work as a watercolorist, and then discovering her older sister Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh’s work. And then the work of their husbands. And from there I was launched into finding who they influenced and their place in art history. I was fascinated with their merging of Symbolism, Art Nouveau, and the Arts & Crafts Movement. I found their sense of collaboration fascinating, and their use of similar shapes and motifs across multiple works, cannibalizing their own ideas and importing them into new works.

I started playing in Procreate, trying to emulate the interesting three-dimensional work of Margaret, and falling deeply in love with her heavily textured expressions. I made it a personal challenge to manipulate Procreate to create work that felt real and had my hand in it instead of just the manipulation of a digital tool’s default output.

And as I’ve progressed over the past year, I think I’ve had more success in specific endeavors and less in others. I learned I had to continue the well-practiced “Bird Portraits” I’d come to feel comfortable executing. I could do them relatively quickly, where I was still learning how to accomplish what I wanted using the new style I was pursuing. I learned that I could still make spiritual, interesting visual expressions relying upon methods I’d already practiced for a very long time—that I was still happy with what I made, even though I was happy in a different way with the new work I was inventing.

And month by month, my “muscle memory” has grown, my process has solidified, and I’ve even been able to combine the two different sides of my coin in some expressions that have been my most successful and engaging.

I’ve learned that scale is good for my work—that while it can be captured as a greeting card, my more complicated works that involve multitudes of texture are more intriguing and visually interesting when you can see all the detail. And that requires large prints.

So I started making limited edition signed and numbered prints for sale in my shop, and began entering them in a local co-op art gallery.

Exploring a new style, making new things, selling them in new places (well, selling them in a “place” at all other than online) has all been deeply validating and a huge boost for my morale. Every piece I develop makes me feel positive, optimistic, and excited to see it printed in multiple sizes, making it part of new sets. The very newness of everything over this year has been the binding thread of both trepidation and glowing optimism that has wrapped around each endeavor. The more I create, the better I feel and the less scary everything seems.

In a very real sense, “I create, therefore I am.” If I don’t keep making, I’ll lose momentum, confidence, and hope. If I don’t keep exploring, I will succumb to negativity and doubt. And that’s not something I’m interested in doing.

I know I’m dancing on ice, but the more I dance the more I feel like I’m actually skating, and gliding through routines becomes easier and easier. The more I make, the more graceful it feels.

And that’s quite a thing to realize looking back over the past year.