Taos Sunrise, the Gorge Bridge and Williams Lake

Also on my New Mexico sunrise bucket list, the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge.

Worth the early morning visit. It’s a big tourist attraction in Taos, and for fifteen minutes at sunrise, Soni, our dog Maisie and I had the place to ourselves. Almost no cars passed us. We could see for miles in every direction. It’s a terrifying and utterly magical spot.

After the sun came up, more folks started to arrive, so we packed up and headed up to the Taos Ski Valley, to hike the Williams Lake Trail. It’s been ages since I started a hike so early in the morning. The air was cool and fresh, damp from the previous nights frost. The sun was just beginning to peek through the trees and rise over the mountaintops.

all photographs by me, Becca Grady.

A Hike in the Pecos, Stewart Lake

Stewart Lake is an 11.5 mile loop hike to an alpine lake in the Pecos Wilderness, about an hour and twenty minutes from Santa Fe. Silas and I have hiked this several times since moving here. It’s a beautiful hike and we wanted to get one last trip to the Pecos in before the snow flew, so we headed out to catch the last of the autumn aspens.

Minus the month and change of a broken toe and limited mobililty, we’ve tried to hit the trails at least one day a week. The mostly Saturdays spent in the woods, far from cell reception, without emails, and usually with few other people, have been a balm this year.

Our dog Maisie loves looking at the lake but dislikes getting her paws wet.

Silas really likes tall grasses

all photographs by me, Becca Grady

Abiquiu Sunrise

Silas and I woke up at four am to get to the car to drive the hour to Abiquiu Lake just before the sun rose. Honestly I thought I was going to miss it as we sped along past the Georgia O’Keefe center and Bode’s and the sky was starting to lighten, but we made it to our perch, just over the dam on the Chama River, to watch the sun come up over the mesas.

We recently adopted a dog, Maisie. A two year old blue heeler mix from the Española shelter, she was still adjusting to life with us. The early morning wake up definitely confused her and we’ve been paying the price ever since. She now thinks four am is the new six am. She hated the car ride, but was happy to check out the scenery in Abiquiu.

Once the sun was up and the air began to warm, we went down to the Chama River for a walk.

all photographs by me, Becca Grady.

End of Summer, Michigan

End of summer is my favorite time for swimming. The sweaters come out. The air temperature may be dropping but the water is the warmest it’ll be till next year.

Silas and I have been staying close to home this year and so I’m visiting a summer past.

A few summers ago, I spent a week on an island in Lake Huron in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, close to the Canadian border. A friend I’d made on forest walks at a previous residency (ACRE in Wisconsin) invited me to a friends residency at her family’s cottage. There was little cell reception. No electricity. Big skies, lots of stars, sun, and swims.

I spent the time walking around the island, collecting rocks, watching the lake turn colors with the changing skies.

In the middle of the island was a small pond with a dock, perfect for those late summer swims. Here are some photos from that week:

Till next summer,

All photographs by me, Becca Grady.

Mountain Time: To the top of Jicarita Peak

It’s been a month of a broken toe keeping me extra indoors, and two weeks of smoke from the Medio and Caja fires making the air heavy and casting a haze that hides the mountains from Santa Fe’s view. I’ve been dreaming about mountain hikes, like this one, to the top of Jicarita Peak, last fall.

At 12,809 feet, it has amazing views of the Truchas. We went in late October, and the leaves were beautifully golden, but the wind was seriously cold and biting. The hike is beautiful, with some steep inclines. but worth it. Serpent Lake is not to far of the trail if you want to stop for a lakeside picnic or a camp, and there’s a great view of it from above.

Studio Visit: Painting and Dancing in Raychael Stine's Albuquerque Studio

It’s been ten years since painter Raychael Stine and I had studios next to each other in Chicago. I met Raychael in graduate school at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where we were both pursuing an MFA in visual arts. Our studios were both off of the large drawing classroom on the fourth floor, plain unassuming doors that led beyond to artistic chaos and big city views. We stayed in touch, and now both live in New Mexico where Raychael is an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

I visited Raychael at her painting studio on UNM’s campus and later her home, back in February, and she showed me what she was working on. Our conversation took place before the pandemic hit in March, so her studio has shifted a bit as she is now working from home. I loved getting the chance to visit her studio. It’s been wonderful to see her paintings evolve. Find Raychael online at www.raychaelstine.com and instagram @rayrayandbertie, and read on for our conversation about Raychael’s paintings and practice.

Raychael’s studio

Becca Grady: Can you introduce yourself and your work?

Raychael Stine: I’m a painter and I mostly paint extremely colorful abstractions that take a variety of languages of paint and kind of shove them together. There are some stylistic approaches that would suggest the light underneath something or perhaps the shadow behind another painting. So, there are some trompe l’oeil aspects but then there’s also a lot of expanded and exploded gradients that turn into little nugget chunks, and they kind of all come together and make a dog or some kind of physical culmination of a sort of secret dog. You don’t see the dog right away, they kind of come together later to show the dog. But there’s a variety of painting that I do. And then I have a big wide language around those words that I use. Like jammers and yows, and vision paintings. Jammers and yows are kind of spirit dogs but really, they’re just paint shoving up against other paint. So, jammers is like jamming of different kinds of space and material and pictorial information together and then a yow is sort of a traditional word for a spirit dog, like the Hound of the Baskervilles or like Black Shuck or any of these kind of apparitions that people talk about out on the moors.

BG: Got it. What is Black Shuck?

RS: Black Shuck is a story from Yorkshire, about a specific dog spirit out on the moors around a certain town. If you see Black Shuck at night, he’s got glowing red eyes and he’ll drag you to hell. But I am interested in these spirit hounds because there is also one story about a hound, a woman and two dogs called the Night Mallt or Matilda of the Night. Some people in the town think that the Night Mallt is this screaming terrible witch banshee with two black dogs with glowing red eyes. If you see her out, you’re going to die, and she’s going to take you to hell. But then other people in the same town or right around there think that the Night Mallt or Matilda of the Night is actually this benevolent spirit goddess guide who has two giant white dogs who will get you home safely.

BG: Oh wow. I love that.

RS: So, I love this kind of weird good/bad/in between about these imaginary creatures or not imaginary creatures out on the moors. But for me they’re more. They’re not direct dog portraits. They’re kind of about dog energy which for me is a thing that is talks about the immediacy of life and being present to life and about joy and love and the interconnectedness of beings.

BG: One of the reasons I was so excited to see your studio now was because it’s been almost ten years since we had studio spaces next to each other in graduate school. I feel like both of our work has changed so much in the last ten years. It’s really interesting to see the paintings that you’re doing now because they are so similar and so different from what you were working on in school. I feel like you just starting using the color gradients at the end of grad school. They were very small pieces in the paintings, and the dogs were very carefully rendered, similar to how the flowers are in the newer work. I was wondering if you could talk about this. I mean you don’t have to cover ten years. What’s the biggest shift in how you think about painting since we were in grad school together ten years ago? Or at least in the last several years?

RS: I think of painting, at least my practice, as a self-eating snake. And that really came in to play in graduate school. Before graduate school I would paint very naturalistic dogs and weasels and rats who were prancing through an imaginary landscape. Then suddenly blobby goopy corporealized paint would come in, and they were having this battle and adventures in some way, and this corporeal paint would come and take over and basically render them helpless. Like they would have their story going on but then this paint would come in and just fuck them all up. So, I decided when I went to grad school that I wanted to make the kind of paintings that I was told that I should never do because they were not interesting or worth things in the contemporary world. I decided to paint really straightforward dog portraits and still lives but they were also about pictures. I also have always been interested in the paint being a thing too. There’s never a time that I’m not painting when the paint is also stuff and not just a vehicle to display a window into a scene. When I started doing very naturalistic painting which I had never really necessarily done. I was using the photograph really intensely.

BG: In that you were painting from photographs?

RS: Yes, in painting from photographs. And I became really interested in the photograph as a thing also. And the painting as a thing. I started hanging paintings on the wall, or drawings on the wall, and painting trompe l’oeil paintings of paintings. So, the last thing I did in grad school was basically a big trompe l’oeil painting of one of my very loose messy underpaintings of a dog on the wall. And that came about because I was so interested in the light and shadow happening underneath that piece of paper that the underpainting was on. So fast forward a huge amount. After grad school I started a group of paintings called vision paintings. These took the gradient of a shadow behind or next to or some kind of light reaction and turned it into a lensic kind of aural. Then I collected palettes that were used to paint other things and put them on top like a platter. So, it was this painting that collected all the materials from making other observational paintings. Then the little nuggets of paints became entire palettes that would have painted another naturalistic dog or something but then the nugget just became the entirety of a realistic dog without actually painting the dog because the color is from mixing its body. Those paintings became about looking at paint and light and time and shoving them together on a platter of extreme visual space, shifting so the background is always blurred and then the stuff floats in front and there is a hovering in between space inside those vision paintings.

Then I took that which originally came from working on things naturalistically and started looking at weird light phenomena and rather than painting works that looked like paintings tromp l’oeil floating on the wall I started to try to describe space behind paint in a different unknown way. I started looking at like when you turn off a screen, sometimes there is a glow left on the screen. But there is a logic to painting a shadow underneath something. There’s a logic to the way the light shifts like in the saturation of color in a shadow. So just the understanding of the shift between the saturation and tone shifting of complements in a shadow. Basically, I used that over and over and just switched the colors and what used to be a nugget would flatten out. What used to be a nugget of a palette mix would suddenly flatten out and become a light shift or gradient shift so that the thing also became the space around the thing and would constantly jam or switch.

BG: Which is where the jammers came out of?

RS: Yes. But you also need to know that in grad school, Jesse McLean nicknamed my dog Hal “the jammer”.

BG: Oh, okay. I never heard that before. Ha-ha.

RS: Hal was little jammer. So, at the same time the jamming is the jamming of paint space and what happens when you shove, if that’s the right word. But I like the shoving and then something magical squeezes out. The borders now are often like this magical squeeze. And then they come in and out from the picture on it, which I do still call it a picture on the inside.

Raychael Stine at home with Bertie and Hal “the Jammer”.

BG: I noticed that there is a lot more movement in the center of your recent paintings, more than there was in older ones.

RS: Yes, in the centers. The border stops everything and pins it and allows for this energy to kind of go around it and then the work on the inside is super active and loose, so that’s always really loose acrylic work and then I put the borders on after I work that center really quickly. Most of the paintings are very fast suggestions of dogs that I have very quickly worked on top of other post cards or which have made their way into my work as hats on little paintings on little vision paintings. They are like nods to other works or other temporal things in the studio or other artists. I just started kind of pulling dogs out of all these postcards and then that led to doing really big loose paintings which really don’t look like dogs until you sit with all of them and a dog sort of slightly barely appears very cryptic. Sometimes the color palettes come from other paintings or they come from other photographs or they come from looking at the shadow underneath something and like inverting it. There’s a lot of flipping stuff around and turning things inside out.

BG: What are you working now? For instance, can you tell me about the paintings that are up in the studio now? 

RS: The painting that are up in the studio now are affected by living in New Mexico for sure. I moved here in 2013 to take my position at the University of New Mexico as an assistant professor of painting and now I’m an associate professor. I always used to paint things in portrait format, and I've shifted them. Suddenly I started doing work in landscape format, not related to still life. I started going out and working plein air because it’s such a weird thing. Like who does that? But if you move to New Mexico you do that!

BG: I know, so many people do that here!

RS: I was teaching, and I thought how fun would it be to reinstate this class called Wilderness Studio which was one of the first outdoor studio classes ever created at a university. This class had kind of gone by the wayside. But it was the very first one. It led to land arts of the American West and all these really important arts and ecology programs. This original Wilderness Studio was literally just can we go outside, and can we paint or make anything outside?

Basically, no you cannot. You kind of can but it’s a lesson in failure and adventure and you know we don’t think that a plein air landscape painting has anything necessarily interesting about it now. Especially when you are a studio painter and you’re just so detached from that kind of anachronistic observational work. But actually going out and doing it just I mean it just I do a lot of observational color mixing. The landscape in New Mexico has all these lovely crazy pastels and pinks. I live in Albuquerque, in the Sandia Mountains. They are called the Sandia Mountains, Watermelon Mountains, because when the sun sets, they turn this crazy amazing pink. I get to see that every day. It definitely changes the way that you paint. It’s why all these artists and painters have come to New Mexico for hundreds of years. 

BG: I love that about the mountains! I never made the watermelon connection though. 

RS: Yeah Sandia. So, my paintings turned into landscape position. I was working typically with dog portraiture. There is something about a dog portrait that is so wrong to do. You’re not supposed to do it, you’re not allowed to do it. Which is why I like to do it. And now that these paintings are so abstract, they’re still dog portraits so there’s still like this little illegal thing but now I’ve shifted them and turned them on their side so that the dogs are laying down. I started thinking of them as like Ophelia paintings, similar to the Millet work Ophelia. But these are not about a woman killing herself because her boyfriend has left, I don’t remember is that what happened? I was interested in that painting because there are these little floating flowers in the water and there is the light in the water where the water is so transparent and it’s just touching her and her hair is flowing and he put this really weird arc frame over the top of it. So, there is like a blue flower and a red flower that just look like they are floating on top of this painting and then this arc thing.

BG: The arc is the one thing I do not remember about the painting. I’m going to have to go back and look at it. I remember the glow and the flowers in the water and the hair.

RS: It’s just a golden thing. It’s crazy you don’t notice it because it’s a frame, so you’re not supposed to. I like to think of paint like a veil because it is stuff in front of and on the surface of something.

BG: Oh, I like that. 

RS: So always in my work there is the light coming over and there is veil in front and there is all this flipping of space on and in and on and in.

BG: And sometimes there is the shadow.

RS: Yes, the shadow. So, I thought that weird arc thing over her was amazing and then I was thinking that it is a veil and the water is like a veil and her hair.

Also, I love to garden. Since moving to New Mexico, I garden like crazy. I started making some paintings that were at least talking about my gardens based on the color selection I was making so I started some Ophelia paintings where I shoved the dog on its side and put it inside of a box like a garden bed and then I made my color choices based on certain flowers and things that I had in my garden. Like one of them is called “Ophelia One with Cosmos and Peas”, like cosmos the flower and also cosmos and peas. And the other is called “Ophelia Two Roses with Lettuce”, so it has a vegetable theme.

BG: Yes, that is so great.

RS: Then there are the borders. Instead of it just being a suggestion of light or floating have shifted and bent into sky and ground or sky and river or sky and pond so that has but so then the dog on the inside there is still a framed inside so it’s like pulls inverted in multiple perspectives at the same time and flat so it’s like a garden bed and a bed and a frame inside of a frame and like blobs of paint.

BG: And tears, and the petals!

RS: Yes, and so, what evolved from that, because since I’m always playing with things becoming other things becoming the same thing again like the self-eating snake, the dog ear has turned into a daisy petal so through my paintings for years and years I've used the daisy as a floral reference to pushing up daisies or another cliché kind of little flower that no one gives a shit about like a little daisy. My very first little painting of daisies I ever did I buried with my dog Pickle when she died, in a sweet honoring way. I’m not macabre but she was buried with that painting. I think of daisies as really important in terms of like a daisy as like a smiling innocent flower, but it’s also like pushing up daisies like the dead and it’s cheesy and it turns into a cartoon so but a daisy petal is also the shape of a tear and also the shape of a dog’s ear and sometimes a paw is the same shape as a really dumbed down daisy flower. All these pictorial symbols or approaches kind of mold and flip into each other in all these ways. That is how the garden bed is also the dog or the tears become these little naturalistic trompe l’oeil things added to the painting, water droplets/tears. You can’t see them until you get up close but they’re also talking about in and on at the same time because thematically whatever it is works with what’s going on even if it’s just materially right working with wet paint like with the materials I use. Like I use a very dry brushed through oil paint but then I use very wet sloshy acrylic, so when I put and there are also droplets of paint that just behave in this spattering drippy way so like doing some trompe l’oeil work that also suggests that but as water and putting those together I don’t know I just like that.

But yeah, the tears. And they become a sprinkler so the one I’m working on right now there are tears coming out and there are these two big daisies, but the tears are like this sprinkler rain craziness.

BG: Which goes back to the garden also. I have a vague memory of this, did you work as a florist for a while?

RS: I did actually, for thirteen years.

BG: Another flower connection.

RS: It is. It was very important to me to go to the things that I loved and knew. And also, the things that I thought were like I was saying illegal to do in art making especially as a woman. You don’t paint dogs and you don’t paint flowers if you want to be taken seriously. And then I realized that actually a lot of that was my own judgement or what I was trained to believe as a student and I never accepted.

BG: Well you got so much pushback about that in grad school.

RS: I did. But I did it on purpose.

BG: Well ok, but everyone went for it. You had to defend yourself at every single critique. And you did such a good job at every single one. I was so impressed with you and how you handled the critiques.

RS: Thank you. That was my goal. That is why I went to school and did what I did. I needed to be convinced myself about what I was doing. And about the strength of what I wanted to do which was paint my dogs, paint these things that were important in terms of meaning, also paint paintings and have a love of the history and the craft and just fuck with everything, fuck with it a lot.

BG: I love that

RS: It’s almost like cutting up what you’re doing and putting it in the blender and taking a picture of it being blended or like I've done this and now putting it back together I’ve folded it this way and I’m pulling it back together. so now the colors are like insane.

BG: The colors are so awesome. Your studio is amazing. The colors are so good.

RS: There’s definitely thematic colors in my life. Sometimes I’m in the studio and it’s so intensely bright and for a minute I’m like I hate this but then I have to trust what’s coming out. Like ok you just made this big daisy, but it looks like a cut-out paper flower on the front of this painting now it’s like huge but also it looks like a Mickey Mouse hand in some way. Or like what the hell is that. So, you know I just kind of go with what comes out. And the crazy colors are what's coming out.

BG: Yeah. I love it. Do you have any routines that you like to do in the studio? Do you listen to music?

RS: I dance in the studio. I dance in the studio more than I paint. And I have to have a playlist, I have to have my songs for that period of time. There’s a lot of pop music. There are all kinds, I’m a musicphile. I work a variety of ways so sometimes I’m very still  and I’m painting very slowly and small and I need to get up and move around and then but when I’m doing the parts like the backgrounds that are really washy with all the movement you were talking about that literally like I lay my work down on the ground after I stretch it and I work above it. So, paintings are the ground, they’re on the wall, they’re big. So yeah, I dance in the studio. I have the same studio outfit that I’ve had for ten years. Same thing as if I go work out. I can’t work out unless I have the right outfit. same thing in the studio. I have to wear my painting dress and my apron. The apron was given to me by a friend whose Greek grandmother made it. I’ve had it forever. I used it in the floral industry too as my floral apron.

BG: What are you dancing to this week?

RS: This week I was dancing to Carly Rae Jepson.

BG: Excellent choice.

RS: I was also listening to Betty Who and dancing and I have been particularly interested in Caroline Polichek's "you’re so hot you hurt my feelings" that album Pang is so good. she’s the singer from Chairlift. It’s so good, it’s super good indie pop.

BG: Oh, I don’t know her. I’ll have to listen to her.

RS: And then I was listening to Banks “Look what you’re doing to me”. It’s so good too. I like to move in there. My studio is filled with joy. Everything about it is ecstatic. It’s fun, its love filled. It’s like a giddy kind of place.

BG: You feel that walking in. I felt that walking in. The color and the movement in paintings, and you’ve got all that extra light in there. It’s excellent 

RS: Thanks. I love my light in my studio. It took a while, but I was able to do that.

BG: I also wanted to ask you about teaching. Do you have any advice that you give to your younger students, like when they are stuck or advice for working through creative blocks?

RS: For undergrads or grads, I think my go to pieces of advice that I think are very important because they are very important to me is to start perhaps by giving yourself a problem to solve. Or making a problem for yourself to solve. So instead of starting with a super blank canvas and trying to make something perfect. that’s going to be you making something you’ve already seen that you already know. you’re not solving a problem you’re trying to recreate something that your brain already knows which is never going to be very good. But if you start with something, like a mess, like pick three colors, throw them on the canvas, then you have something to work with you have something to fix. so, make it work, put a mess, and make it work somehow.

BG: I’ve heard similar advice about giving yourself some perimeters and rules. Like come up with three rules or something for whatever your project is, and then you can break them, but you get this sort of concentrated thing that you’re trying to work out in a tinier space.

RS: Same thing. You solve way more problems when you have very limited perimeters. Or you come up with something creative and interesting. Another I guess would be that do not imagine that your work is somehow separate from you. and also, you don’t have to put all of your political leanings or like social thoughts or philosophical beliefs into your work. Like I don’t need you to teach me a lesson when you make something. I don’t want to pretend we’re playing a science game. I’m not going to be the person who’s encouraging. That’s not my way of approaching work. For me it’s like how do you mine your life? And it doesn’t have to be you have there’s so much information in the material in the approach and in the process that you have to trust that your audience is smarter than you think. Because if you say it’s gotta be one thing than you have just killed the thing that anyone would like be surprised by in it. so, the goal is like to do it with the least amount of information possible whether or not that’s material or marking or whatever I don’t know what it is. Find the broadest way that someone can enter and then make them stay.

BG: I like that.

Raychael in her Albuquerque garden

RS: The balance of that is very difficult. The thing that keeps me out but also makes art dead on arrival is telling me what I’m supposed to see or believe or know about it. What is most exciting and generative is the thing that surprises you. And it might be that you come to it thinking you know it but the good in it is that you just don’t. You realize that you don’t and that’s when you say I don’t know. 

BG: When the magic happens? 

RS: Yes, that’s when the magic happens! And it can be in just a painting. That can happen in a painting. You don’t have to have bells and whistles and installations and videos and whatever. You can do that too, but you can do it in just a painting. 

BG: Where can folks find your work? Do you have any exhibitions coming up?

RS: My website is www.raychaelstine.com and Instagram is @rayrayandbertie . I had a two person show back in September and there is talk of doing something else in the next year. But nothing is really solidified yet. But I have somethings in the works.

Thanks so much Raychael!

More Studio Visit posts. All photography by me, Becca Grady. 

Springtime in Kentucky at Mammoth Caves and Four Roses

While we are all stuck at home during this lockdown, I’ve been traveling instead to the past, to my photo archives, revisiting old trips.

This week, I came across some photos from a trip a while back to Kentucky. It was early spring then, as it is now, trees were starting to get the hint of green, and fruit trees were exploding with blossoms. I drove to Mammoth Cave National Park, and stayed for a few days.

It was chilly and rainy, but that doesn’t matter when you’re plan is to head underground. Underground it’s damp anyways. Most of the caves are accessible only on a tour, with a guide, along a fairly well marked path. Some trails are harder than other, and some have lots of stairwells put in to make them more accessible. The first cave I ever went into at Mammoth Caves had an entrance that was a glass revolving door. The guide said it helped to keep the cave climate intact, not letting in too much air at once. It felt like entering any old shopping center or office building but this one sent you into cave instead.

Some of the ceilings and walls have graffiti, names drawn on with candle light or matches.

Perhaps less of an attraction are the trails above ground, but there are lots , and it’s really beautiful, especially in the early spring when everything is just starting to come alive.

On the way home, I stopped in at Four Roses to taste some bourbon and learn a bit more about how they make it. Four Roses has always been a favorite of mine, so it was fun to get to visit them. They have two locations, one where everything is made, and a second where they handle all the distribution. Sadly, I didn’t get to see it being made, as the location on my route home was focused on distribution, but it was still fun to see! I loved seeing the old buildings, and it was fun to see all the barrels lined up.

Do you have any favorite spots to visit in Kentucky?

All photographs by me, Becca Grady.

A Day At Point Reyes

While I’m at home with travel plans on hold, I’ve been sifting through old photos and picking out my favorites. It’s a nice way to revisit memories, find inspiration in older work, and (also important but perhaps less exciting) get organized.

I took film photographs with my old pentax 35mm throughout high school and college, but stopped taking photos for a few years in my twenties. I had gotten really into making artist books and comics, so I was drawing most of those days, instead of taking photographs. Around the time I started thinking about going to graduate school, I decided that I wanted to start taking photos again, and made the switch to digital. These photos are from a trip to California in those early grad school days.

I was visiting my friend Ben, and we met up with his good friends Claire and Gabe, and drove out to Point Reyes, to the lighthouse and beach. On the way we saw a few cars had pulled over next to a farm, and followed suit. A cow had given birth just moments before. We watched as the mom cleaned the baby gently, gave it a little nudge and it took its first steps. It really is magic. Can you imagine being able to stand up when you’re less than an hour old?

I remember this whole trip as being magical. I love the northern California landscape with all of its micro climates. The fog enveloped us, showing us bits and pieces of the world in full detail, and blurring out the rest.

One day I hope to get back here for another visit.

All photographs by me, Becca Grady.

2020 In Books: Part One

I had fun compiling last year’s year in books list, so I’m making it a regular thing!

Here is part one of my 2020 year in books. This is a list of books I’m reading and loving so far this year. For the record, if I don’t like a book, I usually don’t finish it, so you’re never gonna see it here. I listen to a lot of audiobooks in the studio and on road trips (though currently reading exclusively at home these days…). Since most libraries and bookstores are closed right now, I’m also including some short stories that I’ve read online and loved, in case you’re interested in something short and easy to get lost in. As ever, if you have any recommendations, leave them in the comments/ I always love learning about new (to me) books.

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern - A dark and twisty fantasy novel filled with books and keys and mystery. What’s not to love?

Our Stop by Laura Jane Williams - An entertaining and quick read about missed connections on the train. I of course loved this, because my favorite thing to do with my college roommates was read the Chicago Reader’s Missed Connections. We read them religiously. Sadly no romances arose from this.

The Undying by Anne Boyer - I started this at the end of 2019, and finished it in January. Technically, I included this on last year’s post, but I don’t care. I’m including it here because I don’t mind repeating myself. It’s such a beautiful and heartbreaking book.

Constellations by Sinéad Gleeson - An amazing collection of essays on the body, pain, music, love, and growing up in Ireland.

Such a fun age by Kiley Reid - Read this cover to cover on my flight home from Maine in January. I was completely hooked and loved every minute of this. You will not want to put it down.

Mr. Salary by Sally Rooney - A story you can carry in your pocket! As a fan of tiny books, I was pleased to find this edition of Sally Rooney’s short story.

Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer - The most entertaining style guide I’ve ever read. Sonia can attest to the fact that I often laughed out loud while reading the parenthetical commentary.

Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie - Kathleen Jamie is one of my favorite writers. Go read her nature writing! She is a Scottish poet and writes beautifully about our worlds.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong - So amazing. So beautiful. So heartbreaking. Poet Ocean Vuong’s first novel reads like one long stunning poem. I loved every bit of reading this book.

Rootbound by Alice Vincent - I’ve been following Alice Vincent on instagram (her handle is @noughticulture ) where she shares photos and stories about her balcony garden in London. Her memoir chronicles botanical history alongside her own forays into gardening.

White Album by Joan Didion - Joan Didion chronicles life in California in the Sixties and Seventies with an edge of anxiety that feels eerily relevant today.

Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes - Straight up read this because it’s set in Maine, and I won’t be able to get back there for a while, so I’ll take all the nostalgia I can get. It’s a small town drama with some romance thrown in. Very good for taking my mind of current events.

Underland by Robert Macfarlane - A beautifully written exploration of the underworlds, from myths, to historical events, to the author’s own caving adventures in the Catacombs, Greenland, Italy, and beyond.

And a few short stories I enjoyed in the New Yorker:

Night Swim by Anne Enright

Out There by Kate Folk

All photographs by me, Becca Grady.

All About Photography + How I Work With Photo Clients

I love the way the light comes in at the end of the day and slowly paints shapes on the wall across the room.

I love using the light along with my camera to create images. Sometimes it can be a spotlight.

Or the light at golden hour, casting a halo of soft warm light on everything, right before the sun goes down.

The light on a cloudy day offers up a soft, matte lighting, perfect lighting for just next to the window, or hiding in the hedges.

I like to work with whatever light I’ve got for the day, to push it to create beautiful, thoughtful images.

I’ve had a camera in my hand since I was a kid, when my dad gave me his old Pentax to take photos with. I love focusing in on all of the details of a scene and weaving a series of photographs together to tell a story. I use natural light and elements to help capture a feeling with all of my photographs. My photography style is documentary and editorial, meaning that I like to capture life as it is, in all it’s beauty and messiness. Trained as a sculptor, I have long used photography to capture shapes, textures, and movements in the world. Leveraging my years of creating beautiful on-brand content for my jewelry, I now offer tailored photography services for individuals and families who are looking for an adventurous portrait session and for makers, entrepreneurs, creatives, and small business owners who are looking for inspired photography to tell the story behind their brand.

WHAT I BRING TO THE TABLE:

• My love of the natural world informs all of my work. I use natural light, settings, and props that reference the textures, shapes, and shadows found in nature.

• I shoot on both digital and film. We can do a mix of both for your session if you’d like. Or if you want a portrait session all on film, let’s do it! If you want your styled product shots to be super crisp and clean, I can shoot all digital, for that extra sharpness.

• I have over fifteen years of experience working behind the scenes with artists, makers, creatives, entrepreneurs, and small business owners, including my own jewelry business. I understand all of the daily wins and struggles that go into turning your passion into a successful business. I know how important it is to have clear and compelling imagery to help you connect with your audience, so I will leverage my experience and my photography expertise to help tell your story

• A love for beauty in all its imperfections. I shoot a mix of digital and film for this reason, I like to see a bit of a blur here and there, a bit of movement. I want my photos to feel authentic, to really represent the wonderful folks and creatives that I have the privilage of working with. I do light editing to all of my photos, making slight adjustments to color and exposure, and occasionally removing a blemish. I do not use a heavy style of image editing, meaning that I won’t be airbrushing any wrinkles and my photos are not edited to the level of a fashion magazine cover. I’m trying to show real life. I like to go au natural - prefering to use the best damn light I can find to make you (or your brand) look like your fabulous self.

 MY PHOTOGRAPHY IS FOR YOU IF:

• You are ready to show up and be your creative self.

• You have a deep respect for the natural world, and care about sustainability in your life and business.

• You are looking for photographs that reflect who you and/or your business truly are, and the things that you are passionate about.

• You would like a portrait session, styled product photography, or a creative small business branding shoot.

If you’ve got a project that you’d like to collaborate on, I’d love to chat with you about it: let’s connect.

Studio Visit: Painting on the Coast of Maine with Elizabeth Kelley Erickson

Elizabeth Kelley Erickson is a painter based in Maine. We’ve been friends for over twenty years. It’s been ages since we’ve done a studio visit, so on my last two visits home to Maine, in September and again in January, we made the time to sit down in her studio and chat about the work she’s been making lately. We talked about her inspiration, her recent move to California and back home to Maine, as well as her upcoming show at Frank Brockman Gallery in Brunswick, Maine that opens on Saturday, March 7th.

Becca Grady: Can you start off by talking a little bit about your work and what you do? 

Elizabeth Kelley Erickson: Through painting, drawing, art + yoga, and archeology, I’m exploring nature, relationships, culture, and consciousness. I’m following three seemingly separate internal calls: painting, art that comes up out of yoga and meditation, and archeological art. All three areas have come on really strong in my life and I’m searching for the intersection, to see how they might take form in a way that makes sense. All of them are connected to place and to making work that comes out of an experience. All the work is about nature: nature as in the natural and human worlds, and the spiritual nature of things. Meanwhile, archeology has me delving into both my imagination and science about this magic little archipelago of islands in Cape Porpoise, Maine. I have always felt that it is my soul’s home. There is such a draw for me to experience this place. It is constantly changing. It’s a real living relationship I have with this land. I just want to be out there: exploring every tidepool, knoll, nook, the mudflats, and all the geological flows and features. There is a lot of evidence of humans in the junque that is washed up, and with how our human activities affect intertidal life. I want to know all the stories, including the histories and layers of human occupation, while also acknowledging the sense of impermanence with regards to the future and climate change.

BG: You've been painting and drawing for a long time now. Can you talk a bit about how you got started? 

EKE: Well, I must have let enough of my desire to work as an artist be seen and there were a few key people in my life who caught that. They mirrored it back to me, offering encouragement and support. My friend Jeannie, who just passed away, had me start with scribble drawings. This entailed putting on some music, waving the pastel in the air (charcoal, brush, anything) as if you were conducting the music, and letting it flow onto the page. It took a combination of internal drive and external support to break through fear and actually get things moving. I took classes, went to figure drawing groups, and started painting out in the landscape. I began running with a group of artists and we would plan painting trips and call it “Art Camp”. There was a lot of talent in that group and they were all so generous, I learned from everyone. We showed work together and a lot of us are still dear friends. That crew and my teachers and early encouragers effectively performed an act of midwifery that brought my work into the world. It is so important to encourage one another. I take the opportunity to encourage other artists whenever I can. 

BG: So, you were my introduction to figure drawing. I still remember all those nights going to the figure drawing group with you way back when. Is the group still around and do you still go? How do figures show up in your work today? Has that changed, evolved over the years? 

EKE: Oh, wow Becca, I remember meeting you as a teenager. You had an uncanny wisdom and were already an independent thinking artist. Yes! The groups are still happening, I go when it fits with my overall workflow. It is always helpful to work the drawing chops and I love re-connecting with my home-team of artists. A couple years ago I was inspired by my interest in working with shapes to take a workshop with Ken Kewley. He is a master teacher and has a great way of working small compositions with hand-painted paper. After that workshop I started working directly from the figure with collage. It is a great way to explore the integration of figure in space as well as to work with observational abstraction which has been a long term pull for me. 

There are other long held figure ideas gestating but it remains a mystery as to when they will take form, but they have to do with letting the charcoal fly on a large scale and relate to the collages in terms of straight-line construction. Figures come up through the art & yoga too. These are coming from memory, sense impressions, the subconscious. Usually they are gestural or little figural blobs and flying or dancing or doing things in the landscape.

BG: You lived in California for a while, and then came back to Maine. Did living in California shift any perspectives in your work? Immediately I think about the difference in light between the two coasts. Is that something that you notice or think about? Has your work changed being back in Maine?

EKE: Yes, I definitely tapped into the brights out west, it is really funny to look through all my older “gray” paintings of New England landscapes compared to what came out after I started painting vegetation and botanical forms out in California. I also got really into yoga. I literally went out to buy fluorescent paint because it seemed like the vibration of the plants was so high. It was so LA, I’d have a morning green drink, go to a phenomenal yoga class, and get to work painting next to a massive cut leaf philodendron. I found out that philodendron translates to ‘Love-Tree’ so that became the name of that series.

I moved to California right after finishing my MFA in painting. Being out of school and in a totally new place there was a freedom to explore and reconnect with what and how I wanted to paint. I ended up squelching my expression during the MFA experience so I could do what I needed to do for the program. Once I got to California, I experimented more. The internal and external light and energy affected me, my paintings got bigger, more expressive, and the color came back. That energy and language is part of me, and it is coming out in the work I’m making now that I’m back in Maine. The thing about California was that the influences out there tapped into a part of me that had been dormant: the light, the joy, the energy, the friends I made, teaching art, teaching Kundalini Yoga, the huge creativity. It was so fun. I do miss LA, my friends, all the art, artists, yogis and definitely although I also love wintertime in Maine, the weather. I’m glad to be back in Maine though, to get grounded, to settle into my studio, and let the work integrate. 

BG: You've been working on a series of paintings of rocks. Can you tell me about them, and how you're thinking about them now? I'm especially interested in hearing about these three large, colorful ones that you've just finished. I love these paintings - they are so strong and vibrant, not quite of the ocean but absolutely of the ocean. It's almost like what you would see if you were at the water's edge on a really sunny day and you stared at the sun for too long and then closed your eyes, and in your mind’s eye you saw the same scene but abstracted into vibrant colors. These began as smaller studies that you painted on the island in Stage Harbor, and then made them larger, correct? Does anything change or shift with them once they become larger? How do you approach the color in these? 

EKE: Thanks Becca! I love your afterimage impression. I’m so glad you got the sense of sitting next to the ocean. This is really what they are about, that experience of sitting amongst the seaweed covered rocks. The intertidal zone is totally my muse right now. There is so much life and magic and metaphor in this place between the low and high tide marks. I’m working something out on a deep level here. It feels like the key reason I had to come back to Maine. This flow of paintings started back in the summer of 2017, with the small paintings done out on the islands. I had been working out there with big shape breakdown, with observational abstraction. The application was brushy and gestural. Then my painting buddy Janet Ledoux and I took a field trip to the Museum of Fine Arts. I saw a little Arthur Dove painting of the night sky. I was struck by the simplified and contained shapes and the mystery of Dove. The next day when I went out to the island, I was painting on the far side of the island and I had the most amazing sensation: my body was tingling and I truly felt this one-ness, an order, a rightness of everything with everything. I was painting away feeling grateful and amazed at it all. I was capturing shapes of the light on the seaweed, the rocks, the surface of the water, and small breaking waves. They were all coming out more contained like the Dove painting, but it was less representational. My alarm started going off and I could hear the faint chimes, but I just kept painting. I was half-sitting on a rock with my leg extended in a tidal gully, and I could feel the tide rising up my leg! I had to get back, so I did not get caught in the tide, but I just kept painting. Then a little mink popped up on a rock about 5 feet away, went behind a rock and dropped into a pool nearby and disappeared. What a gift, I was given this non-dual experience, totally one, totally happy. I packed up really quick and felt like I danced across the rocks to get back. I had to go through the mud, wading home while holding my kit and the painting up out of the water. I did a couple more paintings over the next few days like that, and then the following week, I headed back to LA and started working on the larger versions of these paintings in the studio. It was as much about savoring the raw beauty of those days in the intertidal as it was about building images in the studio. I kept the colors pretty consistent, they are bright, but it was important to get the deep color sensation of being amongst the seaweed rocks. Shortly after that, we moved back to Maine. After getting my studio space set up, I brought the paintings back out of storage. I just finished and delivered them to Frank Brockman Gallery in Brunswick, Maine for a show. These paintings are part of a larger series called Rocks and Sea that I’m still working on, out on the islands and in the studio. 

BG: You also have a series of more meditative paintings, the circle drawings. How do you make these? They look so good altogether, seeing the differences in patterns. 

EKE: Thanks for that, they are really experience paintings. It is phenomenal where art can take you, what it can show you about yourself if you let it. That series comes directly out of my yoga and meditation practice. I have the materials set up and move right into making after a yoga set and meditation without breaking the energy. So, the art comes right out of the meditative current. There are a lot of surprises with what comes out onto the page, it can get pretty personal. I’ve been using this method to connect more intuitively with nature too, working outside and feeling for the pulse of the setting I’m in, whether it be the garden or the intertidal zone. It’s a way to listen to the earth, which is so important to our collective vision. It feels like magic when the imagery of the ancients flows out of the brush, and how what I’m learning through archeology rises up. I have to thank my teacher and mentor Hari Kirin for guiding me to a new level of depth with my art & yoga practice. She is a fantastic painter, yogi, teacher, healer who wrote the book “Art & Yoga”.

BG: When you describe what you do you mention Art + Yoga almost as a different category – is it? Do you think of it as separate from the rest of your art making, or as a practice that informs the rest of your work?

EKE: Great question, it started as separate. I saw it as a way to clear the noise and tune myself in creatively, to explore the unknown. A place that was not to be seen by anyone else. My work from observation started to show up, like memories of subjects I had recently painted on location would meander onto the page in a gesture or shape. I started using meditations for visual perception and intuition with the intention of listening to and looking for what the land, the natural world wanted to communicate. Using art as attention to witness. The same spirit of curiosity, looking and listening runs through the archeology. Imagery inspired by archeological digs and the ideas we are gathering about how life was for the ancients started to flow after meditating. So, I am finding all the strands weaving together, informing each other.

BG: You mentioned that you've been working with an archeological project in Cape Porpoise and that you're learning technical drawing as part of this. Can you tell me a bit more about that? How is the technical drawing different? How does one learn how to do that? I imagine it comes easy to you after years of drawing, but the drawings look so perfect. 

EKE: Yes! This is another phenomenal thing that happened. The natural magic of life amazes me. The islands that I paint on are part of the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust. The trust land borders my family property. All my life being in this place I’ve wondered about who lived here before, what was the cultural and geological history. So, I was out there painting last summer and ran into the lead archeologist and was invited to volunteer 3 days later at the excavation of 700-year-old dugout canoe from the mudflats in front of my family cottage. Crazy, right? We had been walking over this thing for generations! Everything clicked and I have been working with CPAA (Cape Porpoise Archeological Alliance) ever since. Having accurate technical drawings in addition to photos is an important part of the archeological record. The team showed me basic drawing conventions and I worked up a scale drawing using rulers and grids. It’s a lot of looking and measuring, once you get a basic schematic you get into a rhythm. The thing is, this canoe is very complex. It is deteriorated, cracked into pieces full of worm holes. So CPAA set up a workshop with Sue Osgood, an expert epigraphic recorder who has been documenting the temple and tombs of Egypt, to work with us to innovate a method for drawing the canoe. This project is in the works. The team has pointed me to conventions for drawing stone tools and artifacts which I’m working with now. I love the discipline of it and am grateful for the in-depth study of these artifacts and what they can tell us about who was here before us. 

BG: What is a typical day in the studio for you? Do you have any routines? Do you have favorite tools or music that you listen to? 

EKE: Celery juice, morning practice, yoga, meditation, writing. It is key for me to take care of myself and have a service component to my day, to tend to home, to relationships, and to get out in nature. A friend of mine said “The rocks you are painting love to have you witness them”, I feel this as an energy exchange. So, I’m always intent on clearing things that block my spiritual sense and developing my ability to witness. I listen to a lot of mantra, beats, rhythms, and even medieval music like Hildegard of Bingen. I have a playlist for my Rocks & Sea series, the other day I could not get enough of whale sounds. Some of my music reaches into the ancientness of the rocks and the fluidity of the water. Sound carries a healing vibration, so I’m immersing myself in a vibrational soundtrack of the intertidal. My secret hope is that there is a healing going on with the “gazing”, the attentional and imaginative immersion in the intertidal. It feels like a love affair. When I give myself over to it, I feel the reciprocity and sense of wonder. As for a routine, my perfect workday is art and yoga in the early morning, studio painting after that, a great walk in the afternoon with some archeological drawing, and study before dinner. When I’m working outside, I plan around the weather, the light and the tide cycle. If the light is right at high tide, I take a kayak, if it’s low tide I’ll need my big old boots. I am out there a few days a week, sometimes walking, sketching or taking photos and then going back to the studio to paint. 

BG: Are there other creatives, painters, writers, thinkers, that you look to for inspiration? 

EKE: I have always loved painters like Joan Mitchell, Richard Diebenkorn, Willem de Kooning, Manuel Neri, Elizabeth Cummings, and Cecily Brown, for their gesture, muscle, and surface. I look at many of the Perceptual Painters of the Hawthorne lineage for their value and shape flow, paint application, and soul. I also love drawing. I’m thinking of Jenny Saville’s big drawing of 2 reclining figures that I saw recently at the Broad, and some of Ginny Grayson’s head studies, and of Jacopo Pontormo’s work. Hilma af Klint really got me and I like looking at strange medieval painting, Outsider Art, and dreamy work like Kyle Staver. I’m inspired by Mark Bradford’s epic work and I follow a lot of contemporary painters like Terry Ekasala, Galen Cheney, Jennifer Pochinsky, and Daniel Crews Chubb. 

BG: Do you have any shows coming up? Where can folks find your work? 

EKE: The best place to see what’s happening is on Instagram: @elizabethkelleyerickson and my yoga art feed @heartseyeart. Right now I have a solo show of yoga art at Positive Works Studio in Amesbury, Massachusetts (by appointment only, email me at capeporpoiseme@hotmail.com), I have 3 small collages in the Nano: A Tiny Art Exhibition at Engine in Biddeford, Maine through March 22, 2020, and I’m excited that the beginning of my Rocks & Sea series is up at Frank Brockman Gallery in Brunswick, Maine opening March 7, 2020. 

Thanks so much Elizabeth! If you’re interested in seeing what the intertidal zone in Cape Porpoise looks like, you can see it at sunrise in September here, and find more Studio Visit posts.

All photography by me, Becca Grady.

Why I love Maine in the winter

Growing up in Maine, summers at the beach, in all their sandy, salty glory are embedded in my memory. I can still taste the salt on my upper lip after a day in the ocean. Less appealing but equally memorable was the moment at home, taking my swimsuit off in the shower and finding seaweed that had been kicked up from a storm and had traveled home with me, piling up on the bottom of the tub, mixed in with any leftover sand. We also took seaweed home on purpose, to my childish embarrassment. At the end of every beach day, my mom would fill up the trunk of the car, or a box in our VW camper van with seaweed to take home to the garden. Winter was equally glorious. Snow days were spent sledding at the dump (now a recycling center), ice skating on Roger’s Pond, and somewhere in Alfred, I can’t quite remember was a barn that we would skate in. Mom would make homemade snow cones, snow and maple syrup. She even made the maple syrup, hammering taps into our handful of maple trees and hanging buckets up to catch the sap. The sap would simmer on the stovetop for hours, until it reached its golden sugary perfect consistency. Or not, occasionally they would simmer too long and become a blackened mess that took days to clean out of the pan.

Winter was the time after the tourists went home. Each year of my childhood they seemed to stay longer, all summer, then the leaf peepers in Fall, then the Halloween tour buses that would arrive to go to the haunted houses on Summer Street, then Christmas Prelude in the port. But come January, everyone went home. The beaches were quiet, and most shops and restaurants closed up till March. As I grew older, and got my driver’s license, winters became even better. I would borrow my parents’ car, get a gas station cappuccino, turn up the stereo extra loud (Mazzy Star - rest in peace David Roback, DJ Shadow, Portishead, Tricky, all on tape) and drive around the beaches, empty, cold, and beautiful.

I live across the country now, in a quite a different landscape, in New Mexico. We get snow and cold wind too, but we have mountains instead of waves. I went home in January this year and was reminded of just how much I love Maine in the winter, January in particular. The flights were cheap and half full, with the holiday rush over. There were snowstorms of course, but thankfully it only slowed down the driving, and not my flights. I stay with my mom when I go home, in her tiny cabin in the woods. We drove around the beach, went for walks, made lots of coffee and good food. The beaches were empty, just how I like them. With a few folks off in the distance, leaving their footprints behind, but also leaving us space to be alone with the wind and the ocean. The beach is extra special after a storm, the sky still cloudy and grey, but beginning to calm, and slowly to let the sun back in.

Mom, just after the snow stopped, on the pier in Cape Porpoise.

All photographs by me, Becca Grady.

Venice in a Snowstorm

It didn’t start off like the photo above. It was a winter day, almost ten years ago. My friend Nicole and I left Bologna for Venice on the early train. It was grey and chilly. We were taking the long way back to Torino, with a day, really just a few hours, to wander around Venice. It was quiet, decidedly not tourist season, and the cold kept everyone indoors.

Eventually the grey skies opened up and Venice became a magical snowy wonderland. I was dressed for warmer Northern Italian weather, wearing my purple oxfords with zero tread on the bottom, and I slid around like crazy on the cobbled streets and stone bridges.

I’ve been trying to organize my photo archives, and found myself revisiting this trip. It seems fitting to share these photos today, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a world away, and almost a decade later, in the middle of a snowstorm. I went for a walk in the afternoon, and the snow was pelting down, hard and fast and wet, just like the snow in these photos, taken across the ocean.

Have you been to Venice? Have you been in the snow? What are your favorite spots? I would love to visit again for a bit longer, so send me all of your recommendations!

All photographs by me, Becca Grady.

Studio Visit: Flowers and Art with Abigail McNamara of Bagel's Florals

Abigail (Bagel for short) McNamara is an artist and florist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I found her through her flower work on instagram, and was excited to see some of the artwork on her website. In addition to making beautiful floral arrangements that she sells through her bouquet subscription service Bagel’s Florals, she also draws, paints, and makes installation work. McNamara grew up in Montana and was raised by two gardeners. Knowing this, I wasn’t surprised to learn that during the summer months she also grows some of the flowers she uses in her arrangements in her garden, in addition to sourcing locally (like Mini Falls Farm) whenever possible. We connected at the end of January for a photo session and studio visit in her Albuquerque studio, where she showed me how she creates her amazing floral arrangements. We talked about running small creative businesses and the challenges of carving out free creative time.

Becca Grady: Could you introduce yourself and what you do?

Abigail McNamara: My name is Abigail, or Bagel for short. I am primarily an artist and craftsperson. That just bleeds into everything I do, whether it’s working with flowers, or playing with paint or string, or playing in the garden. Everything that I do is very process oriented and I like doing things with my hands. So, I would say I’m an artist most generally and then there are a lot of specific things that I do, but they are all kind of working towards the same end. They all chill me out and they’re all centered around seeing beauty and nature and processes.

BG: How did you get started working with flowers?

AM: Looking back, it’s much easier for me to see how I ended up with flowers. I went to college for art. I was trying to make art to make money, while also having a day job, and my day jobs took me all over the place. I started out vegetable farming. I worked for a couple of small businesses. While I was working for this bakery, I heard about an opportunity to play with flowers: during the Valentine’s Day rush at this really big florist in San Francisco. So, I worked the Valentine’s rush, which meant showing up to work at 2 am, working till 7 in the morning, and then going home. It was the weirdest schedule, but I was instantly enamored with being around so many flowers. Then, one of my co-workers at the bakery told me about an apprenticeship at a small urban farm in San Francisco that grew flowers. And so, I became an apprentice there and I would go once a week and harvest flowers and learn about growing techniques and we would also design bouquets for market. And so, looking back, I feel like it happened very organically, like flowers found me. they really are a nice place between my interest in plants and processes, and my interest in art. After I moved to Albuquerque, I interned for an event florist called Floriography. I was getting to be around flowers a lot but was starting to want to express my creative voice with them. And so, I started Bagel’s Florals as a subscription program. Really, I created it just to give myself an opportunity to play with flowers every week and to go with the seasons and to find my creative process with flowers, but soon I found myself running a business.

BG: When did you start Bagel’s Florals?

AM: It was sometime in the summer of 2017. I don’t know exactly when it started. There was the time when I had the domain name, but I didn’t even have a business. It just very slowly happened. I never intended it to be my sole income or a business. I didn’t write a mission statement. I just scrapped it together and then was like ‘I guess I’m making money from this now’.

BG: And so, it’s grown into being your business. That’s awesome.

AM: It is. It has served me really well and I feel like the community here in Albuquerque has been really supportive of it and excited by what I’ve been doing with flowers. It’s just been a really good environment for it to grow. So, I’ve just let it grow.

BG: Do you have a favorite flower? Or multiple favorite flowers?

AM: That’s like the hardest question ever.

BG: It can be a list.

AM: I feel like it changes with the seasons and also when I meet something new or start using something often. I would say poppies are one of my favorites, although they are really hard to work with in design because they have a very short vase life. But that’s part of what makes them so special, that ethereal quality. Also, sweet peas, which my mom always grew when I was growing up. She always used “sweet pea” as a pet name for us, so I just love sweet peas. And they smell so amazing.

BG: I love that!

AM: I’ve been growing them for a couple of years now too. It’s hard not to list a million but those are two of my favorites. After those, I’d choose classics like roses and ranunculus.

BG: What was the ranunculus that you used in the bouquet you just made?

AM: That’s a Charlotte Ranunculus. And there’s also this variety called Butterfly Ranunculus that are really cool. I have this whole other category of favorite flowers which are the textures or the “fillers”. The ones that aren’t star flowers or what you would call in floral design “focal flowers”. They’re the weird textures that support the eye-catching ones. There’s this flowering acacia tree that has these little yellow puffballs. I love that stuff. I love textures. My weirdo flowers.

BG: Have you ever done any large floral installations? I was thinking about that when I was looking at some of your art installation work on your website.

AM: No, not yet. It is very similar in a lot of ways, especially the emotional process of making an installation. How you are trying to understand what something is going to be before you make it. It’s like you’re trying to remember a dream or something and you’re thinking of it in your head, but you can’t really identify it and yet you have to prepare to make it. There’s always that period of time when I get very stressed and worried that everything is going to fail. Then there is tons of work actually creating it, but you have to save that, well especially for florals, to complete all in one day. So, I feel like doing art installations has prepared me for doing floral installation.

BG: That’s so interesting. I know that we can have many different creative practices that are seperate and unrelated, but occasionally there can be some unexpected crossover and I’m always interested in where that happens.

AM: Yeah. I also never used color until I started working with flowers. All of my artwork before flowers was mostly white. I had started going into blues and monochromatic stuff. There was a lot of white and black and a little bit of brown, all neutrals. I didn’t think that color was something that I could do, and I didn’t feel comfortable with it, and once I started working with flowers, I started falling in love with color. There are colors that I never liked that I now love because of flowers. It’s cool to see how all the artwork I’ve been making since flowers is super colorful. So yeah, flowers definitely made me more playful with color. There’s a lot of overlap for sure.

BG: Could you talk a little bit about your art practice? Like where do you look for inspiration? You make art, a mix of works on paper, fiber, and installations. Between the works on paper and the more sculptural installations, they all seem to use drawing as a method. Drawing/painting on paper and drawing in space with linen thread and beeswax. Is that something that you think about?

AM: My degree was in drawing, but by the time I was doing my thesis, I was much more interested in sculpture and installation. But my work was still very informed by drawing, whether that was imagery, or line work, or light and shadow, or really focusing on form. I think that’s why I wasn’t doing a lot of color because I was so interested in texture. That’s how I got started and since then I’ve moved through lots of different media. I’m drawn to processes that are very repetitive and detail oriented where I can do one thing for hours and hours and hours and hours to make a larger piece. That’s taken me in all different directions.

BG: Did you find that how you make art changed when you got to New Mexico? For example, did the light or new shapes influence you?

AM: I feel like how I make art is always changing. It did change when I got to New Mexico. I think because of how I was spending my time and how I was directing my energy. I was getting into flowers at the time and was also really into baking, and I just wasn’t making as much art in my studio. I feel like since I got here, I have been wrestling with that a little bit, like whether or not I feel that I’m making enough. At this point, I’m just trying to take all that pressure off and to not be concerned with how much I’m producing, or to what end, and to just spend time doing it because I love it. I’ve been able to change in that way because, before I moved here, I was thinking that making money from my artwork was the end goal. Slowly I realized how much money I would have to charge for my art to make the money that I need to live. I realized that I didn’t know if that was ever going to happen for me and if it was, I would have to be a part of this echelon of the art world that I don’t really want to be a part of. it forced me to realize why I do art, which is primarily for fun. So that’s what I’m trying to do now.

BG: Do you think of these smaller pieces in the studio as potentially working together towards a larger work?

AM: Maybe. I feel like I’m in such a funny place right now, even to talk about my art, because since starting the business I’ve been struggling to find time for both. Because of that I’ve just let go of any kind of expectation of an end result like certain works leading up to a show, or a bigger version, or whatever. So, no I don’t really think of these works as necessarily becoming something bigger although they could if that’s where they take me. Right now, I’m just trying to take a backseat, in terms of controlling what anything is going to be, just letting myself and the work figure it out together.

BG: I had to do the same thing with my art and business. I also worked full time for a long time before I was able to just do the jewelry business. I kept thinking I was going to have slightly more time to balance the two, but the business sort of took up all of my free brain space. So, I had to put my art practice on the back burner.

AM: Yes, and it’s probably very similar for you, that your business is also a creative outlet. I get to be very creative with flowers and even in the garden. I’m tending to this thing and watching it become something more, it’s very analogous to my art practice. So, I think in some ways I don’t need the art as much, but I also want to get back to it so badly. I want to be an artist for my whole life, so I’m going to be doing that dance forever to a certain degree or another. I try not to get too hung up on how long it’s been or how little I’ve been in the studio, because in the larger scheme of things I’m going to be an artist for my whole life so it’s okay if I’m not having three shows a year or x, y, and z. As long as I just stay curious about that part of myself.

BG: Yeah, that’s actually how I started painting. Because I was like ‘I need to make art, but I don’t have a show planned’. I wasn’t going to plan some big installation when I didn’t have the space for it. So I decided I needed to make something that was certain size.. And then I can put it away and paint over it, or whatever. I would say to myself, ‘ok this is what I’m doing for the afternoon because that is the amount of time that I have’. It eventually turned into a large body of work. But to get started, I just had to say ok, I have this much time to play and that’s it.

AM: Yes, play. That’s such a good word because that is what it feels like to make art, and especially, to paint. There’s something about painting that feels extra playful. Maybe mixing the colors and like…

BG: Getting messy?

AM: Yeah, like taking yourself back to being a kid.

BG: Are there places that you look for inspiration? For art or for flowers?

AM: I love sitting in the window seat on an airplane. That’s one of the most inspirational places for me. A lot of my art reflects systems or patterns on micro and macro levels so when I get to physically zoom out and be up in the airplane, that’s one of my favorite things. I take a ton of pictures from the window seat. I don’t really like flying in general, but I really like getting that view of the world. And it’s both sides of that coin, getting that world view and then noticing really tiny details. So, a lot of times that’s in nature. I walk my dog every day and I’m very attuned to what’s growing in my neighborhood and what time of year it is and what the texture of the seed pod looks like. Maybe that sounds kind of cliché but it’s true. Nature is really the main place that I find inspiration and always has been.

BG: I was also wondering, since you run a small business, what have been the biggest challenges for you? And is there anything you would like to tell someone else who is starting a business or yourself two years ago?

AM: So many things. To someone starting a business or to myself two years ago I would say – pay yourself. Figure out a way to pay yourself from the beginning because it will make it a lot easier to continue paying yourself throughout the process. That’s something that I’m just figuring out how to do. And honestly, it wouldn’t hurt to do things “right” from the beginning.

BG: What does “right” mean? Like a business plan?

AM: I don’t think a business plan is 100% necessary. But I would recommend opening a business bank account at the beginning – not getting your business finances entangled with your personal finances. It’s just easier if you figure that out in the beginning. Then you are not putting yourself in a position where you are chugging along and trying to do the next important thing, but you have to stop and worry about all these licenses and records and undoing your mistakes. But I definitely didn’t want to hear that. And as much as I don’t think anyone really wants to hear that, it would have made things a little easier if I had started out doing everything by-the-book. As far as a mission statement and stuff goes, your vision can change and develop as you go. But it’s so valuable to go into it knowing some business basics, like knowing the rules so you can break them. I was a DIY kid, and I very much still believe in that philosophy, but sometimes if you just follow the rules it can make things easier.

And to your other question about biggest challenges, I guess it’s not that different from everyone’s life. It’s just like balancing the different roles that you have in your world and being mindful of how you’re using your energy. Which I think is true for someone who has an office job, or someone who works at a restaurant, or someone who is a business owner. that’s just kind of a constant thing in life. I don’t think that there is ever one right answer or one right way to do it. For me, personally, I think it’s always changing. So, it’s just about staying in touch with that and staying curious. Like ‘ok, what do I want to do more of, or what do I want to do less of?’ or ‘how does that affect my art practice or my business?’. So yeah, I think balancing everything is the hardest part of running a small business, but I think that may be true about anyone’s job.  

BG: Where can folks find your flowers? Do you have any pop ups coming up? 

AM: You can always order Bagel's Florals for delivery through the online shop: bagelsflorals.com. This week, for Valentine's Day, we'll be popping up all over Albuquerque – at And Stuff Collective on Thursday the 13th, and then on Friday (Valentine's Day) at Little Bear Coffee, Heidi's Jam Factory, and Paradise Club Vintage. At the moment, I don't sell anywhere locally besides via the online store. In the summer, I pop-up more frequently as there is a lot of locally grown product available to me, and I'm pretty easy to find during the holidays as well.

All photos by me, Becca Grady, 2020.

A Long Wintry Weekend in Nederland Colorado

At the weird moment between just before it’s officially winter, when the snow is already falling in the mountains, Silas and I drove up to Colorado for a long weekend. Nederland is a small town at 8,000 feet about a half hour from Boulder. We ended up there accidentally on a trip to the Rocky Mountain National Park in 2016, and liked it so much we went back for a week in 2018. Silasi had a work meeting nearby, and we realized the only way we’d have time to go again this year was if we mixed work and weekend.

Winter in Nederland lasts from October to May, as the proprieter of the outdoor clothing store, Mountain Man, told us on our first trip here. As predicted, there was a snowstorm on our second day. The reservoir in the center of town still wasn’t frozen over, so the snow melted and the water steamed as it hit the cold temperatures.

With all the snow, we thought that some of the rocky, narrow and steep mountain trails would be inaccessible or too slippery. So we headed for a great trail just outside of town at the Caribou Ranch Open Space, that we remembered from our previous visit. It’s fairly wide and flat, so it was an easy snowy walk, especially since we’d brought our micro spikes.

On our last morning, before starting the drive back to Santa Fe, we walked up some of the streets that climb up and look down over the town and reservior. The air was crisp and cold, but the sun came out, and we met a fox along the way.

Nederland is officially one of my happy places. With mountains, water, snow, foxes, horses, and a lot of crystals at the rock shop it ticks all the boxes. We schemed about how to have a mountain cabin one day, worked, got frustrated with work, went back to scheming about said mountain cabin and took a lot of baths. 

Plant Diaries: Winter at Mini Falls Farm

I’ve hit that point in winter where while I don’t mind seeing those beautiful snow topped mountains in the distance, I really want just want to be looking at some greens, some new growth, the hint of spring to come.

At the end of January, I drove to Chimayo to meet Mykel and Lindsey, who run a flower farm there called Mini Falls Farm. Down 84/285 to NM-503 to Juan Medina Road to NM-76, then make a few quick turns down a single lane dirt road and there is Mini Falls Farm. There is no sign, but the hoops of the garden tunnels filled with cold weather wintering plants that peek out behind the house let me know I was in the right place.

I found Mini Falls Farm in the place where I find a lot of things these days, on Instagram. You should probably go find them there too. I’d never been to a flower farm before, let alone in New Mexico, so I was excited when we connected and found a time for a visit.

I grabbed my camera bag, and we walked around back, and through a fence that keep their lovely dogs out of the flower fields. Mykel lead us over to see the acequia, an irrigation system used in New Mexico. The farm was last used in the sixties, Mykel told me. When they first got here five years ago, they had to clear all the elm trees that had sprung up across the fields like weeds. You can still see them around the property. There were so many of them it was too much to haul them away. Since then, they’ve been using them for wood for the fire, and to build a fence out front. The stumps and roots line the edge of the property. Lindsey said that they read somewhere that they are good bug habitats and will help the flowers, so they decided to keep them. It took two years to get to the point where they were able to start growing flowers. “We had to clear the whole field and get all the roots out. That was a lot of work.”

The snow from a previous storm had mostly melted leaving mud and small pockets of white in all the shady spots. The day was warm and sunny, so Lindsey and Mykel opened up the tunnels. The temperature drops a lot at night, so all of the plants they’ve got started, get covered up as soon as the warmth from the sun starts to fade.

There were a couple of early bloomers in the tunnels that day, but it will be end of February before the anemones are ready, and April for the ranunculus, daffodils, sweet peas, and more. Winter is a quieter time at the farm, and they are planning and organizing their season, and getting seeds in. Soon they’ll start seeds for the spring fields.

I can’t wait to go back and see the farm when the flowers are in bloom!

If you’re looking for flowers this spring or want to learn more about the farm, head to Mini Falls Farm on Instagram, where they share all the up to date news about flowers at the farm.

All photos by me, Becca Grady, 2020.