I’ve been thinking a lot lately about beauty and ugliness.

It’s been way too long since I posted, I know. Crazy/maddening/depressing stuff going on at home and with family. But I actually have been at play.

I just read a most wonderful blog post by Keri Smith, in which she tells a tale of her life in pictures and words, because “I have been working on a plot to infiltrate the system and inject it with my subversive ideas.”

As I mentioned in my last post, I spent the last week of August taking a workshop, “Illustrating the Personal Narrative” at the Penland School.

This Saturday, I’m heading off to the Penland School in North Carolina for a painting and drawing course in which we will be creating “convincing” but fake documents, broadly defined.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how one’s home environment can greatly affect one’s creative energy.

Over the years as I have taken various art workshops, I have learned how to short-circuit my internal editor. You know, that peckish creature inside your head that shoots down any ideas you might have for a new piece of work.

My secret?

In the early 1980s, while living in Chicago and making my living as a medical writer, I found myself looking for a different way to spend my vacation time. A coworker told me about Oxbow, a summer art colony run by the Art Institute of Chicago.

I had my doubts.