The trick actually has little to do with how you distribute your energy, and everything to do with how easily you can accept that you cannot do everything; and with how readily you can be gentle with yourself when it seems everyone else can. I

On spending quite a lot of time with quite a small number of artworks you wouldn't normally see.

We got a new cat.

The most perfect possible bird ushered out this dark year and let me let go into the next one. 

The longest love story of my life, resurrected every Christmas Eve.

Eighth grade was the beginning of the rest of my life.

Jean Baptiste Lucido Johnson Hoar de Galvan: November 2015 - December 2016.

One of our cats collapsed extremely suddenly last night. Things are still up in the air. 

Three-step paintings.

 I truly believe that 4 a.m. is one of the best-kept secrets of the creative world.

Two paintings at the end of a semester thinking about birds.

There is this notion that you are supposed to do things perfectly the first time; a sense that mistakes are so terrible that they signal that the very task at hand has been a total bust. 

Finding the rhythm of “enough" and “try harder” has always been a difficult balance for me. 

An overdue realization hit me: The day when I became Craft Girl Fantasy was never going to come. My precious stacks of scrapbooking paper weren’t doing anyone any favors in these forgotten drawers.

The small things you can do (make caramel! make sushi! fix bikes! fix pipes!) to make your life feel more interesting and valuable. 

Honestly, there’s really nothing better than when someone asks me to draw something for them. Drawing makes me feel good; it makes me happy. When I don’t have to think of something to draw myself, because someone gives me a photograph to work off of, it is a huge relief. 

How one of the worst days of my semester became one of the best days of my life. 

The comically terrible culmination of an unbelievably rough semester.

This little literary journal became a home for an unbridled fury of cat drawings. 

I've been working on this essay about owls for over a year now, which means I've cut almost everything I had written at first out of it completely.