2022

Ever since I started blogging back in 2009 or ‘10, I have enjoyed the annual tallying of life events. And now, my winter doesn’t feel complete without a “year in review” post.

So this is it. Get yourself a cup of coffee, or perhaps a more…reflective…drink ;)

I realize that these types of posts are quite self-indulgent, and that you have a reality completely different from mine - but I hope you will still find some entertainment and insight in what I’m about to write. Sharing our experiences is one of the most human things.

Looking back at this year about to end, two things stand out to me: a tragic one and a happy one. I wrote about both of them at length in my “Love in the Time of War” post. The war in Ukraine and my wedding.

Here is the rest.

January

Sometime in late December ‘21, I get asked if I’d like to teach architecture at the local university. Surprising as this is, I have always wondered what it would be like to teach at the higher education level. It was one of the career choices I considered at some earlier part of my life but never pursued.

So, after some deliberation and check-ins with my business and life partners, I say yes. It helps that the commitment is limited to one class, one semester, very much defined scope. Let’s see what it’s all about.

Due to leftover covid policies, the first two weeks of the class are online. It’s brutal. I spend a full week before the class starts learning the ropes of the university’s remote learning delivery system and preparing my course content.

Thankfully, I’ve had a lot of virtual meeting practice by now. The very first class, although nerve-wracking for me, goes smoothly. I feel like I just finished a marathon.

Sac State card

They call me “Professor Watts.”

There is a sense of…not quite responsibility…maybe debt that I feel when it comes to teaching. Like I am trying to single-handedly undo the trauma of architecture school that I experienced.

Most of my students are women. How many female architecture professors have I had? Maybe one. How many of them were first-generation immigrants? None.

I know that it’s a huge task to represent, be approachable, and instill a sense of “this, too, shall pass” into the very abstract and self-important world that higher architecture education is. But I am proud of myself for moving the needle just a little tiny bit.

All of that being said, I do not re-enlist to teach another semester. My architecture practice needs my undivided attention and the stress of keeping up with both was getting to be too much.

I feel a blog post on the power of saying “no” brewing.

February

February starts with a celebration of sparkSTUDIO’s birthday. My firm turns 2. We light sparklers!

sparkSTUDIO birthday celebration

The rest of the month is taken by preparations for my upcoming wedding (and that of my brother, who decides to schedule his wedding two weeks before mine). Getting ready for two weddings at the same time is exhausting.

On February 24, Russia strikes Ukraine. My heart sinks. I am disoriented and paralyzed for weeks.

March

I used this sketch of Erik and myself on our wedding invitations

The war spills into March, and every month since. As a Ukrainian immigrant, I am struck by the survivor’s guilt, a particularly painful variety of an alternate reality. It could have been me sheltering my children in bathtubs, basements, and subway stations. Those could have been my brothers taking up arms and defending our country. I could have been living in any of the targeted cities - I used to be a regular on the overnight Odesa-Kyiv train.

The guilt makes me freeze up, strapped to the steady drip of news. Most of them bad, with an occasional injection of hope and even humor. Ukrainians have a sense of humor even in the darkest times. I can’t move.

I go through the motions, because the alternative is the depression paralysis. I get up and take the kids to school and I work. But any plans beyond tomorrow seem to be locked up beyond a door I can’t open. Today matters. Next week? Who knows what happens next week.

And yet, the weddings do happen. My brother gets married, and two weeks later, so do I.

My wedding is, of course, way better than his ;)

Tea time sketch at the New York Edition hotel

April

Our New York City honeymoon is beautiful. This is my third time here:

First, just an aerial view of Lady Liberty and an overnight stay at a motel as a refugee on the way to California.

Second, many years later, several days at an architecture conference, my first solo trip after being married for eleven years. The trip when I finally realized I had to get a divorce or else I wouldn’t make it.

And now, the third time, a new beginning. A perfect bookend to a chapter in my life.

We come back home in time to celebrate Katia turning 10. She is such an amazing, beautiful, bright human.

May

Sketching at Bodega Bay

May is busy with work. Seriously, looking at my photos from May, it’s pretty much just snapshots of “existing conditions” (industry term for already-built stuff), basements, attics, measurements, sketches, and pictures of my kids sprinkled throughout. It still blows my mind to see this evidence of a functioning, successful architecture firm that I started from scratch.

June

June brings Father’s Day, Erik’s birthday, and my dad’s birthday. It’s basically a father-figure conspiracy month. Erik and I take a short trip to Bodega Bay, a sleepy coastal town with ties to Hitchcock’s The Birds. (My cinephile husband thinks of all of our destinations in terms of movies).

July

Summer is in full swing when July comes. School is out, summer camp is in. Erik plays a show, and it’s great, despite his protests. We take the kids to a production of Beauty and the Beast, starring Erik’s daughter, who is an amazing singer herself.

August

The main event of August is my son turning 13. He is tall, handsome, and full of mystery. I see him turning into a young man before my eyes. (And all of my kids just luuurve Starbucks. A new one was built from scratch and opened across the street from our house. Highlight of the year ;) ).

September

September, as usual, means my birthday. I give myself the gift of a few days off and an encaustics webinar. I’ve wanted to try encaustics for a long time, but couldn’t swing it when the kids were younger (hot surface, blow torches, fumes…you know). But now, I buy a live course by an encaustic artist I’ve been watching for a while (and I once literally begged her to sell me a small demo piece during her Seattle studio visit).

Encaustics experiments

Encaustics is fun. I learn the basics, and very quickly become frustrated with the slow pace of the course, along with the artist’s unwillingness to share a more “advanced” technique that is her signature style.

Through a little bit of googling and reverse engineering, I learn that technique, too.

I vent to my husband about this artist’s stinginess…Which I’ve encountered before. Artists holding their cards close to the vest for fear of getting copied, or somehow taken advantage of. Trade secrets. Spy games. Scarcity mindset.

I think generosity is a better way to live. Don’t you?

My sketch of Katia at the beach

We return to Bodega Bay, this time with our kids. We stay at a “modern yurt” house, which is made up of two round “yurt” volumes connected by a more conventional rectangular core. It’s a curious place - at night, you can see the stars in the round skylight at the top of the yurt, and when it rains, you hear the rain all around you.

October

In October, we host an epic yard sale (the kids loooove yard sales) and my musician husband plays another show. It’s a blast. I love his voice and the passion he brings into everything he does.

And did I mention he published a book? I watch him work on it, methodically, little by little, on weekends and after work, for almost a year. He reads it to me at night, to iron out the language and get my feedback (though I do tend to sometimes fall asleep when he reads to me ;).

And while the book is not completely autobiographical, a lot of it allows me glimpses into his mind, both when he was growing up and now. It’s a well-told coming-of-age story. The man is a fantastic storyteller, yet another talent in his arsenal.

What else to do during presentations but sketch the beautiful architecture? Julia Morgan would approve.

The last weekend of October is taken by the Monterey Design Conference - a work-related getaway to Asilomar. It’s simultaneously relaxing and intense. I miss my husband and kids within the first two days. I sketch furiously, feeling my tired brain stretch out and enjoy the moment.

November

We celebrate Ella’s birthday in November, just after Halloween, which is also the 19th anniversary of my immigration. I do some mental math and realize that in just a few years, the scales will reach an equilibrium- I will have spent as much of my life in the U.S. as back in Ukraine.

December

Once December hits, I am ready for winter break. I “save up” vacation time throughout the year to take two full uninterrupted weeks off around the holidays. By American standards, this is indulgent. By European ones, it’s laughable.

Whatever it is, I enjoy unplugging from social media and letting my email go unanswered.

We have way too many holiday parties, between various parents and other family members. I feel a meltdown coming: me plus lots of people, plus no me-time, plus stuff I “have to” do, minus a quiet place to do the stuff I want to do - equals low, low, low mood.

Black and red sunflowers, a meditation on the war in Ukraine.

I wish I were a different person, someone who loves being there for others, someone who enjoys spending their “free” time interacting. Instead, I long for solitude. I feel the need to save my energy, whatever little I have left, and burrow into some dark, warm corner. Maybe I’m secretly a small hibernating animal.

And yet, I also love this time of year. I enjoy giving gifts. I crave the labor-intense holiday foods I grew up with: kutya (the cold and sweet Ukrainian “Christmas soup”); kulebyaka (the cabbage-stuffed savory pie); apple strudel with paper-thin crust and powdered sugar; red caviar on everything. It’s a comfort thing for the angry, hurting, homesick Ukrainian in me.

Two colors dominate the Ukrainian culture. No, they are not the blue sky and golden wheat fields of the now-ubiquitous flag, though those are also important. In the long history of Ukraine (longer than that of Russia, if you can believe it), the two colors are red and black.

Black stands for tragedy and sorrow. There has been plenty of that, usually thanks to some king or another, who decides to come, conquer and destroy our land. This war is nothing new.

Red stands for love and happiness. Love of a mother for her child, love of a woman for her man, love of a man for the land he was born in. All these loves are cross-stitched with a red thread into our lives.

And that’s what I think about when I look back at last year: black and red patterns. Love running through all of it, like a river.

My Landlady Was Right All Along

Hope called me back in two months.

“Are you still looking for a room?”

I wasn’t, as I was living in the back of a Pepto Bismol-colored home of an old lady by the name of Olga, and sharing the greasiest kitchen ever with an Indian grad student.

“I will knock a hundred down.”

This made the rent manageable at $450 a month, while being an added expense compared to the $350 I was paying Olga.

Olga had odd friends, who would occasionally attend her front room parties, where she liked to show me off: behold, a foreign architecture student. Tell us something interesting.

“Okay.”

I wrote down the address but I didn’t quite know how to get there without a car. Hope offered to pick me up at a BART station.

She drove a small, boxy silver-gray car, the make and model of which I do not remember. My memory of it now looks like a retired, slightly worse-for-wear Delorean from Back to the Future. She wore her hair in a tight silver ponytail and took off her pitch-black sunglasses for a second to say “Hi.” We sized each other up.

Through a maze of highways and interview questions, we made it to her house in Oakland Hills. I could not believe my eyes: this house belonged on cute postcards, with its ochre walls, dark green shutters, and carefully trimmed rose bushes in the front. It was a stark contrast to Olga’s Pepto Bismol.

View fullsize

I had a hard time keeping track of all the rooms Hope led me through, finally settling at the round wrought iron table of a brightly lit dining room. She had a handwritten agreement that fit on a single page of her legal pad.

I moved into the ground floor bedroom two weeks later. Olga wasn’t pleased and she kept the deposit, alleging that I clogged the toilet and flooded the bathroom. That’d be something interesting to tell her friends about the foreign architecture student.

My bedroom in Oakland Hills was the largest I’ve ever had, to date. It looked into the terraced backyard, with a hot tub right outside the bedroom and a huge collection of mature orchid plants in glazed blue pots. On cold nights, Hope wrapped her orchids in sheets to protect them from the weather. The rest of the plants were regularly maintained by the gardener.

Hope lived in this two-story (plus basement) house with her big blind dog Seamus. He was old and friendly and I’m not sure I heard him bark even once. Seamus liked to spend his time in Hope’s upstairs bedroom, an even larger room with blackout shades and a built-in TV cabinet. Hope’s favorite TV show was Six Feet Under.

Getting to the campus from Oakland Hills was an adventure. I walked down the steep streets to the nearest bus station, which took a good 25-30 minutes. The bus would then take me to another bus station, where I would transfer to another bus, and ride another half hour to UC Berkeley. Then the uphill trek to the top of the campus and the seventh floor of Wurster Hall, the worster building on campus when it comes to aesthetic choices. I could never relate to Brutalism.

The way back to the room was exactly in reverse, now a 30-minute climb back to the house from the bus station. It may have had something to do with me missing classes at a higher rate than before.

Hope was not exactly a ray of sunshine. She had a weekly therapy appointment near McArthur BART station, where she would sometimes pick me up or drop me off in her weathered Delorean. She confessed to having a daily struggle with sleep and depression, but this news was delivered to me in an entertaining bit of dark humor. Her ultra-black sunglasses were supposed to help with extreme photosensitivity, brought on by a combination of medications.

No sweat, by October of my first year at Berkeley, I myself was a regular consumer of Prozac, which was supposed to address my anxiety, chest pains, and “flat affect.”

Hope loved listening to me talk about architecture and my life in Ukraine. I suppose this was the same allure that Olga responded to but I didn’t mind it with Hope. She seemed genuinely interested and she had stories of her own to share. Her kitchen became the place we would spontaneously meet and chat.

During these kitchen chats, my eyes wandered around the kitchen and study the shiny copper pots, the spines of cooking books, most on French cuisine, and the postcards pinned to a wall and covering the fridge. I wondered who the postcards were from and why, with so many pen pals, did Hope and her fluffy white dog seem so alone in her big Oakland Hills house.

Hope was an orphan. She carried the last name of her adoptive family and her birth parents were unknown to her. In her early 70s then, she had a sarcastic view on men, and had no interest in adding one to her life. I never found out what she did for a living - I was sure she must have been a retired actress or heiress to some unknown Bay Area fortune. She seemed both carefree and tragically fragile, a short slender woman fluttering around like a hummingbird one second and shutting herself in her dark bedroom for the whole day the next.

I’m not entirely sure how I survived architecture school at Berkeley. Sometimes, I still have the nightmare where I have not yet graduated, or dropped out, or failed in some other way. I was a transfer student, a recent immigrant, a few years older than everyone else. I worked a part-time job to offset the student loan. I still learned new English words every day. I was definitely computer literate but struggled to learn new software and design projects at the same time. I used to function a lot better with a well-trained drawing hand and a single focus on design.

I could not connect with any of my architecture studio professors. All of them were male, white architect superstars. I was not a superstar. I felt that I was failing all the time.

Surprisingly, I connected just fine with all other, almost exclusively male and white, professors. Structures, acoustics, city planning, sustainable design, history of architecture, dark room photography, German - those made me feel grounded, in contrast to the unrelatable studio. Paradox?

At the studio, I felt like an imposter. What human error let me into this impenetrable top of Mount Olympus? Surely, anyone else here is so much better than me, so much farther ahead.

But outside of Wurster Hall, there was Hope. One day, as we crossed paths in her kitchen, she pointed to the black frozen bananas in the freezer in disgust and asked me what that was about.

“Oh, I was going to try a banana bread.” I had a recipe from my boyfriend’s Texan girl.. female friend. It involved salvaged bananas.

Hope raised her thin eyebrows and transferred the bananas from the freezer to the trash bucket.

“Let’s make a banana bread with no rotten bananas.”

She reached for one of her French cooking books and leafed through it, landing on the recipe I still use to make banana bread.

“Here. 2-3 bananas. We have that.”

Hope was precise in her cooking. She introduced me to the invention called a flour sifter and showed me how to measure dry ingredients by leveling the top of the measuring cup with the dull side of a knife.

She got her groceries once a week, on the same day of the week, at the Berkeley Bowl - a wonderland of organic produce, European imports, and local goodness. My strictly utilitarian relationship with food was significantly improved thanks to Hope taking me along on these shopping trips. Berkeley Bowl had my favorite muesli and cranberry walnut bread.

In the span of the seasons that I lived with Hope, we had become an odd couple of friends. Neither of us had much of a social life and so we created one together. She took me to the San Francisco Symphony, where I was dazzled by evening dresses and glorious performances with overrepresented Russian last names. I was her movie date when Pan’s Labyrinth opened at the tiny Art Deco theater in Berkeley. After the movie, she introduced me to gelato.

I lived at Hope’s Oakland Hills postcard house for almost a year. She kicked me out via a handwritten note sometime in the summer. She didn’t explain why, other than pointing out several times when I left something out that should have been put away or failed to clean something that should have been cleaned. She suggested that maybe, after my resentment related to my first few years as an immigrant, working alongside my parents at various cleaning jobs, I was subconsciously trying to make others clean up after me.

I don’t think I was anything other than clueless.

She also didn’t take to my ex-boyfriend-fiancée-unfiancee-boyfriend-husband at all. Hope had a negative gut reaction to my ex and immediately distrusted him. She shared this with me, but, of course, as a civilized lady, she didn’t press the issue. But I think it had more to do with her kicking me out than my occasional messiness.

I also wish she had pressed the issue. My own gut was still catching up with the impact of immigration and the loss of my previous long-term relationship. I was in no state to choose husbands.

Things went downhill after I moved out. I lived in a sublet studio for the rest of the summer, and then shared a two-bedroom apartment close to the campus with three other students. My depression kicked into high gear by then and I struggled to complete classwork. I dreaded going to the studio because that’s where my fear of failure stared me straight in the face. My long-distance marriage had become an escape fantasy, and I would fly to this fantasy island once a month, spend a weekend near the ocean, and come back to reality. Somehow, with the finish line so close in view, I was losing momentum and feeling more lost than ever myself.

By some miracle, I did cross the finish line. In record time, by taking summer classes and loading up on units as much as I could. I shakily walked across the stage of Zellerbach Hall and took the scroll from the hand of some important person.

Even though we never spoke again, I think that Hope, my Oakland Hills landlady, was a big part of me making it. Maybe we weren’t a perfect match, but for a moment there, we were friends. She gave me more than a temporary dwelling, exactly when I needed it.

And Hope was right. My marriage didn’t make it, the guy was a walking red flag. Six Feet Under is an excellent show. Only the best ingredients for my banana bread from then on.

2021 Was Not So Bad

Calendars are convenient. They give us a reference point to anchor to, handy for finding our spot in the spiraling whirlpool of time. Truth is, beyond the repeating patterns of weather and our own seasonal habits, every day, week, and month is different from the one bearing the same name last year.

And by the same logic, it is convenient to label a day, week, or year as “good” or “bad” because of the frequency of negative events and our capacity to handle them. Labeling a year “bad” helps us feel less of a burden of making it better. It takes us closer to the comfort of clearly categorized, black and white lens on reality.

I’m not saying that wanting comfort and clarity is wrong. It’s natural. But it also carries the danger of subjectivity and bias, which may not be ideal when you are trying to be an objective observer of the world around you. And it tends to lean towards negativity.

Memories of Copenhagen, sketching during one of many zoom work meetings

So it’s not surprising to me to see 2021 being labeled as yet another “bad year.” It was probably a little bit of a self-inflicted failure of expectation management - after 2020, we were all hoping for something better. And I think those who expected a “return to normal” were let down the most.

I did not expect a return to normal. It could be that my own life experiences have primed me to have low expectations as a guardrail against disappointment, and then be pleasantly surprised when they are exceeded. There are some questionable mental coping habits there, but we will leave it alone for now. My point is that I don’t think 2021 was a “bad year.” I am quite happy with how it turned out.

And so, here’s 2021.

In January, I pass my seventh and last Architect exam, the California Supplemental Examination (CSE). After a “long and winding road” to this moment, it feels surreal. The night before, the kids, Erik and I agree that if I pass, we will have sushi to celebrate. And if I fail, we will have consolation sushi. Thus the slogan “Do it for the sushi!” Is born.

Earlier in the month, the U.S. experiences a violent attack on the Capitol. It is most definitely the lowest point of this country since I moved here in 2003.

…

February

The main highlight for me is getting my Architect’s license in the mail. So much work, persistence, failure and success is wrapped up in this moment! As it goes with goals that are achieved, I almost instantly begin asking myself the question: “What’s next?”

What’s next is sparkSTUDIO. I hang on to the day job for a few more months of the pandemic but I have already boarded the train to Bosstown.

I immediately begin looking for opportunities to use my shiny new title of Architect on email signatures…and not much else. My answer to “What do you do?” becomes a little easier for me (because the law prohibits using the title of Architect unless you are licensed), and pretty much nobody else gives it a second thought. Wait, you’re doing the same thing you’ve been doing but now you have another paper on the wall? That’s cool.

Nevertheless, I feel like I’ve been knighted. I suspect newly minted Sirs and Ladies add their titles to email signatures at the first opportunity, too.

March

March is rather low key, other than marking the anniversary of the first Covid lockdowns in California. I manage to do some sketching while in Old Sacramento…(need to work on my car and truck drawing skills!).

April

April brings Katia’s birthday, a lovely family trip to the Pacific Ocean and our stay at the whimsical Mushroom House in Bolinas, where we are the first short term rental guests. It’s great to be next to the ocean for a bit, and see it from almost every window of the house. Such a treat! Armed with a recent Ian Stewart workshop experience, I sketch it in water-soluble markers and watercolor and leave the painting as a gift for the hosts. We hope to return next year!

May

I’m not even sure what happens in May. Work, worry, rinse, repeat. That, and planning a trip to Colorado.

…Which happens in June!

Erik and I go to Denver, Colorado, which is only a stopping point on the way to Estes Park in the Rocky Mountains. And Estes Park is where we find The Stanley Hotel (cue in dramatic music and thunder). The Stanley is significant because it’s the inspiration and setting of Stephen King’s The Shining. And that fact is significant, in turn, because my beau is a major horror movie nerd and this trip is a celebration of his birthday. Last year, we visited Ferndale, the filming location for another Stephen King’s creation, Salem’s Lot.

Colorado is beautiful. We take the winding road to the mountains in our white rental Camry, a feat impossible during the winter. As we get closer and closer to our destination, every turn opens a spectacular view of the mountains and forests, layered with fog and clouds, illuminated by patches of sun, dusted with faraway snow. It’s a lot easier for me to get excited by architecture than nature, but I am definitely getting into it!

The white structure of The Stanley Hotel stands out on the rocky hill it sits on, against the backdrop of undeveloped mountainside. We can see it from far away, at the very beginning of our descent in the valley of the small town of Estes Park. The hotel greets us with a wide porch I will later have breakfast on, a grand carpeted stair with gold-framed portraits following us as we walk up the second floor, and a glorious mountain view.

I am disappointed at the absence of a freestanding tub in our room. It was promised to me by the hotel’s website…and they forgot to mention that the hotel’s bathrooms were recently remodeled to replace the tubs with showers. First-world problems, I know, but I was really looking forward to relaxing in a tub filled with hot water….Not warm-ish shower with cold air leaks.

I suppose I will recover. We rest for a bit and then go to explore dinner options in town. The whole town of Estes Park can be seen from our high vantage point of the second floor room at The Stanley. It unfolds for us to go and learn about its streets and old buildings, its tourist attractions and hidden treasures. This is my favorite part of traveling. The unknown, soon to be known and loved.

We head downstairs, past the gold-framed portraits and their watchful eyes, out of the red-carpeted lobby now filling up with loud tourists. Erik says we need to go walk the shrubbery maze in the front of the hotel “real quick.” I’m starving, but I follow him across the muddy puddles through the maze, in the light drizzling rain. He is, of course, recreating The Shining, walking through the maze and then retracing his steps, like a giddy kid.

We walk into a small open space with a pond and sculptural water feature of two faces…possibly kissing. We walk up the platform at the top and look over the grounds.

“This is a cool place!” I say.

“Yes. A perfect place, in fact, to ask you something,” he says, and reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket.

I feel an odd mixture of panic and excitement as I begin to suspect what is about to happen.

“Whaaaat is happening right now?”

And what is happening is him pulling out a small box with a ring in it and asking me to marry him and me being completely unprepared for this and forgetting to breathe for a minute and then saying yes, of course yes, as I put my arms around him and kiss him, right in front of that water feature.

And I kid you not, while all of this is happening, the rain clears up and a double rainbow appears above Estes Park.

July

In July, I and the rest of my coworkers are ordered back to the office - the email from the firm management actually says “back to work,” which strikes me as incredibly tone deaf. Have I been not working the last year and a half, then? It didn’t feel like it. It felt like working double time, all the time.

I am not going back without a fight though. Work from home has become my default method and, while it has its own challenges (I don’t have a separate room to work in - but that’s not any different from working in an open office back at the office), those challenges are eclipsed by the benefits. The commute, generally a complete waste of an hour of my life every day, has become unnecessary, unless I choose to do it. And choice - in time, location, priorities, environment - has become the key word. Why would you give up choice?

In August, sparkSTUDIO wins an award for our housing design - an unexpected but very welcome validation of our work, something we still do after hours and behind the scenes of our day jobs. My son turns 12. Wildfires are back.

September is…eventful. I turn 40, and Erik and I celebrate with a long weekend visit to San Francisco. I geek out on public transportation, architecture and art. We walk the Golden Gate Bridge and that same evening, I have my first ever clam chowder in a bread bowl. San Francisco seems oddly quiet and disheveled …It is still the pandemic. But no matter, I walk around like a wide-eyed child, absorbing the best of the old and the new architecture that the city has to offer.

We spend the whole day at SFMOMA, where I am floored by the exhibit featuring the work of Tatiana Bilbao, a Mexican architect whose focus on affordable housing is both admirable and inspiring. She can’t draw cars either.

Right after my birthday, I sit down with my boss and tell him I am leaving to focus on my own firm. I offer to continue my current projects on a contract basis and we work out an agreement to do so. Two weeks later, I am officially no longer an employee.

And so, in October, after a very short lull, I get to business full throttle. It feels like the the best decision ever, even though I pulled the trigger a few months earlier than I had originally planned. Even though the world is still in the midst of the Covid crisis. I am loving every minute of building sparkSTUDIO and am proud of us.

I give a short talk about our award-winning housing project at a remote award ceremony for the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Erik and I go to an in-person, live music show, first time in forever. It feels incredible.

November brings more birthdays, an actual, in-person Thanksgiving, and finally cooler weather. I settle down with some knitting in the evenings, which has become my favorite winter wind-down activity.

Which brings us to…December. The Christmas tree goes up, the rains come, and we slow down for the winter break. This year, it looks different for me, because I get to say when I need to work and when I can take time away from work. It’s a double-edged sword, of course, as I don’t necessarily get paid vacation time. But I have the choice, which matters so much more.

Re-reading my summary of 2020, I remember the feeling of overwhelm by the barrage of negative events and oversaturation by the dark energy that seemed to fill the very air we breathed. Earlier this year, I caught myself getting sucked into the vortex of this darkness and overwhelm. And when I did, I had to pull the plug and step away.

So this year, the focus has been much closer to home, on the things I can control or at least influence. I have very limited resources to worry about much more than that.

The Effect of the Margin

The most interesting, unexpected things happen in the margins.

Think about it: the last time you went on a carefully orchestrated trip, remember that hole-in-the-wall cafe you accidentally stumbled upon when you were hungry and the five-star expert-recommended eatery was too far to walk? Did you feel that you had discovered a secret, just between you and the few locals lucky enough to live nearby?

View fullsize

The bar at Pink Door, a restaurant in Seattle you can easily miss, unless you know to look for…the pink door in a otherwise blank wall.

Some years ago, I was a newly-wed military wife. I had just moved from Berkeley to Oceanside, where my marine husband was stationed. Not a lot happens in Oceanside…I was constantly looking for things to do and one of my favorite things to do is attendIng concerts.

I don’t remember how people found out about such things back then (internet, of course, but with a lot more effort). Big concerts were advertised (like Radiohead, $150/ a cheap seat, no thanks). Others, the small bands on the margins, you had to be in the know.

I find out about a small venue in Los Angeles that hosts such bands. You do not, back in the mid-2000s, buy tickets in advance on your phone. You show up and if the venue still has a standing spot for you, you are in.

I follow the trail of scheduled shows and find one that, based on one or two audio samples, seems interesting. I research the band and, with the very limited information there is online at that time, decide this is it.

So, we ride to LA, maybe an hour and a half on the motorcycle, to cheat the traffic, and just because motorcycles are fun. The hole-in-wall venue has a line at the door but it is a manageable line, and we become a part of it. It is dark by then - the show was scheduled for 7 pm, but guess what, the band isn’t there, or isn’t ready enough, or they are doing very important things we will later thank them for - whatever it is, shows never start on time.

I stand in the line, in that dark and desolate LA alley, and study the others. What kind of a character goes to a weeknight concert at this tiny venue, to hear a band they have not been aware of until very recently? Why don’t they follow the establishment, the 5-star reviews, the sure thing you can buy advanced tickets to?

(And does it mean that Radiohead is the establishment? Whoa.)

What kind of a character indeed.

Eventually, we get into the tiny vestibule, prove that we are a few years older than 18, and pay the token admission fee. We made it.

Another half hour, or maybe more, passes by. I guess this is the time intended for everyone to buy drinks and get primed for the show.

And finally, finally, finally, someone enters the stage. It’s not quite enough to kill the hum of the people who came here to see the headliner, however obscure. A second person joins them. There is a viola, or maybe a guitar, and definitely a keyboard. Or is it drums?

“Good evening everyone! We are Wye Oak.”

The opening duo begins their set and I am immediately taken by it. I love everything about it, the pace, the lyrics, the low female vocal. How nerdy they both look. How uncomfortable to be on the stage. These are my people.

They go through their set, with reasonably good reception from the small crowd. And after, they move to the side of the room, to the small table with their one and only CD album for sale. I feel like I’m the only one who goes there and buys a CD. I say, “Hey, you guys were awesome. Thank you!”

And then, after a long intermission, there’s a headliner, they are entertaining and pretty good, and I enjoy watching the curious instruments they use.

But my heart is taken by Wye Oak.

No one expected this. This is the effect of the margins, the effect of appetizer eclipsing the main course, the effect of best human connections happening on the outside of the formal networking events and dating profiles. The unexpected by definition.

I don’t know why it works this way. It could be that we are more receptive to experiences that change us when we do not expect them. Maybe we like the feeling of discovery. Maybe the very nature of having a planned and scheduled life sets us up to lean into the margins, the gaps, the sidelines.

The video below is based on an accidental performance I stumbled upon at a book shop:

There is also something to be said for the discovery in the process. All of the daily writing, painting, creating routines bet on the effect of the margins. You focus on doing the thing and going through the motions, just so you can allow the greatness to happen when you least expect it to. But you need to be present for the process.

And it could be about the expectations. Did I expect the opening band to knock me off my feet? No, because it’s an opening band. They are expected to be the lesser beginners, the stragglers, the tag-alongs. And that’s exactly why the contrast between the expectation and the experience is so powerful.

So pay attention to the gaps. Be open to experience greatness where you least expect it. And scribble in the margins, those are the best parts of your story.

2020

Wow. We made it to September, everyone. What an unbelievably strange year! I feel simultaneously like it has been years since March AND like Fridays just come one right after another. Life is both very fast and indeterminably slow these days. Uncertainty plays tricks on our perception of reality.
I hope you have hung in there. I hope your loved ones are safe and sound and that you have found pockets of time to fill with creative things. Or maybe just stayed afloat, that’s all anyone can ask of a human in a crisis.

As for me, I think I went into this with fully charged batteries so to speak, and fared pretty well so far. My main source of stress has been the distance learning for my kids, which turned out to be very frustrating for everyone involved. I’ve been working from home most of the time since March. Before then, I negotiated the (highly unusual in architecture industry) work from home on Fridays. So it wasn’t a completely new thing for me and the transition went just fine. But working from home while also working as a mom, teacher, tech support and therapist to three kids is a whole new level.

We’re managing. It helps that I share custody with my ex and we both get to take breaks. My mom recently started helping with childcare, too, after an intense beginning of the year, when my dad was fighting cancer (he had his surgery right as the hospitals began cutting off all non-emergency procedures and not allowing visitors). That was no fun either. He is doing well now.

I keep trying to build good habits. A routine. Like going to sleep before 10:30 and walking in the morning. I schedule blocks of time on my calendar for work, breaks, lunch, and more work. I love my job but I feel like my whole life is being sucked up by “work.” It feels especially acute on days when I am more aware of the news and less certain of what the future holds or what exactly it is that I have control over. It feels a bit hopeless. And I know I’m lucky to 1) have a job and 2) have the opportunity to do my job remotely. I do appreciate that. I could be unemployed, a single mom of 3, with a mortgage and California-style utility bills.

Instead, I have a great job that pays those bills and I can do it from the comfort of my home. Despite being a woman, an immigrant and a divorcee, I am the privileged minority.

Other than an occasional sketch, it’s been a creative desert here. Somehow, it’s easier to channel anxiety and stress into learning an instrument 10 minutes at a time than into making art. I signed up for an app-based guitar course in April and worked it pretty hard for the first 3 (free) months. Once the trial ran out, I looked around for other resources but eventually bought the paid version. I’ve been slacking on it since then…paradox? I think I need deadlines for motivation, financial investment doesn’t do it for me.

I realize all of this is sounding depressing and gloomy. My friend said today that it must be the “smoke blues” - California is currently breaking fire season records and we’ve been waking up to ash in the air and orange skies for weeks now. We are constantly bombarded by more bad news. Sometimes, 2020 feels like one long endurance test.

But…it not all bad news. There are people in your life who love you and care about you. People who depend on your love and care. People who will risk catching a deadly virus to give you a hug. That’s the good stuff, something always worth waking up for.

Maybe it’s just me, but have you noticed that in this dystopian future, people are starved for connection? They are more eager to respond when you reach out, happy to give and get some humanity. It’s reassuring: unseen dangers are wrecking havoc on our routines but people we know are still the same and still want to know us. There is comfort in that.

Of course, they could just be bored. Too much time on their hands. I keep hearing about that particular effect of the quarantine, and if this is you…please keep it to yourself. See above re: work, distance learning, stress, work, no time, homework.

The point I am trying to make is this: we are living through very difficult times. And whatever your reality of that is at the moment, it is yours to own, even if someone else might have it worse. It’s okay to feel “smoke blues”. We will get through this by carrying each other and offering others the humanity, love and care we all need so much.

I will finish with a sketch from the archives: a basket of lemons, given to me by a dear friend. I got the lemons, she got a painting of them. Win-win! If life gives you lemons….sketch them :)

Seattle - Part 2

Well, dearest readers, I have way more visual content than I have time to post it or write about it. It's a good thing. Life is happening and I alternate between making it happen and holding on as it does.

Studio time does not currently exist. What does exist is the urban sketching during trips and building department visits, and figure drawing sessions once in a while. Live-in-the-moment kind of things. 

And so, more of Seattle today. This, for example, is the sketch I made at the Starbucks Reserve Roastery. Beautiful place, even if I don't care for coffee that much. 

Then there was the Chihuly museum and garden. I didn't know about David Chihuly until my Seattle native coworker enlightened me. What a place! 

I spent some time sketching in the chapel.

...And during lunch at the adjacent cafe with a Steve Jobs-lookalike server and accordions hanging from the ceiling:

The sketch...

...and the photo

This last sketch was at the end of the last day, when we finally made it back to the waterfront and the ferris wheel:

Among other things, I visited the enviable studio of Alicia Tormey, an encaustics artist I've been following for years. I left with a tiny little painting that I basically begged and whined for her to sell to me. 

And, of course, the Space Needle, which was going through a major remodel (bonus points in my case, as I love seeing things getting built) 

There you go. A very concise version of a great trip. I'd love to go back soon - maybe it will even rain for me a little? :)

Seattle - part 1

Here's another good thing about having a full time job - I can now sort of afford to travel once in a while. At least once a year. And judging by my bucket list of places to visit, I will run out of years before I run out of places...so I really need to pick up the pace!

A fair number of places on the list are in the U.S. - like Seattle. This trip just sort of happened, after my husband saw an airfare sale from Southwest airlines. So we consulted the bucket list and cross-referenced it against the destinations on sale and that's how we got Seattle.

Pioneer Square.

Coming out the airport and riding the light rail to the city, Seattle felt very much underwhelming. But over the long weekend we spent there, it grew on me. We caught three days of "sucker weather" - sunshine and blue skies, which, according to my Seattle-native colleague, is the kind of weather that makes people move to Seattle and then immediately goes bad after they do.

I got to test drive my extremely compact sketching kit, including the brand new #14 Da Vinci travel sable brush.

Sketching at the Starbucks Reserve in Seattle.

My current ultra-compact travel palette is shown below. There is no complicated method to my choice of colors here...this is just what I felt like at the time I assembled the palette. The favorites:

• W&N French Ultramarine
• W&N Quinacridone Gold
• Daniel Smith Quinacridone Sienna

Plus the moody dark blues from Daniel Smith, a brilliant vermillion from Schmincke and a fun cobalt teal from Utrecht. The Indian yellow (included in the photo) didn't make it. All of this fits into an Altoids tin.

I was a little worried that the TSA would make me pull out my paints and explain that they are not drugs...But they didn't. Instead, they pulled out a pocket knife out of the depths of my bag. I have a habit of bringing pocket knives to airports...During the trip to Ukraine last year, my pocket knife made it all the way to Istanbul, where it was finally discovered at the security checkpoint and confiscated. It was a good one, too...

Anyway, the trip. I like to take it easy if I can and balance the must-see destinations with random stuff you just walk into. One of my friends recommended that we visit the Fremont neighborhood (not to be confused with Fremont near San Francisco). There were a few things I wanted to see, like the Troll Under the Bridge and the surrealistic and absurd in this context statue of Lenin. And then I just found myself in an antiques store, right next to the center of the universe:

The store turned out to have a nice collection of vinyls and I left with several of them. Pretty soon after that, we stopped at a Starbucks, which interested me mostly for the promise of a bathroom but actually had a very nice second floor seating area with windows onto the Fremont bridge. Which I, of course, had to sketch.

Fremont Bridge.

I learned from a shoe sales guy that there was a curious restaurant called "Pink Door." This restaurant, he said, had live entertainment in the evening. And good seafood. What else is there to want in a restaurant? Dinner was decided.

As it turned out, the pink door was the only marker of the entry into this restaurant. There was no sign above the door. Just an old light pink door. You open it and voila, you're in the restaurant.

The food was superb. We sat at the bar, as all the tables were taken, and enjoyed our seafood with local drinks. The promised live entertainment came, and it was a performance by an aerial gymnast. Additional live entertainment was supplied by our neighbors at the bar - a recently divorced lawyer and her brand new friend who owns an art gallery.

The bar at the Pink Door restaurant.

I sketched while I waited for the dinner and then added paint later that night. I couldn't sleep that night, because...sleepless in Seattle? :)

Pivot

After a few years of my posts becoming less and less frequent, I feel the need to explain myself. If you're in the sacred exclusive circle of people I keep in touch with, you probably know what's up. Or, alternatively, you haven't noticed anything fishy at all. But still, here's an update.

I've enjoyed sharing my journey through art world and parenthood here. I loved helping other artists learn more about watercolor. And I'm sure I will be continuing to do so...just not in the same way.

After I re-entered AEC (architecture-engineering-construction) industry almost three years ago, I felt an instant sense of belonging. Sure, painting is fun and my art career is shaping up nicely - but I also really enjoy the many facets of the architecture profession. I get a real kick out of figuring stuff out. And I know art and architecture aren't mutually exclusive - but the time and intensity needed to keep the art career moving forward is not something I currently have...

In front of the Seattle Public Library by Rem Koolhaas.

I am focusing on architecture, again, and the art is being pushed to the margins. It makes me sad and frustrated a bit but it was a necessary move. Once I accepted that I can't keep up the pace I had before the full time architecture job, my frustration went down several notches. I'd like to think it's one of those "it's time for this and time for that" situations. It's time to get my architect's license and it's time to be a fully independent human. Masterpieces of contemporary art will either have to wait or happen in-between the lines.

This is not a goodbye. It's a pivot. I will keep creating but I will also have to redefine myself as an artist...whatever that means. I used to think I'd create larger and larger pieces, but in the last few years, I turn to my sketchbooks more and more. I had visions of complex, abstracted cityscapes but when I'm looking for a release, I paint people. I come back to people. Go figure.

Katia. Le Pen and watercolor in a Handbook sketchbook.

Keep an eye out for more sketches, then! And if you feel like sticking around, let's see where else my journey takes me.

Until next time,

Yevgenia

Ukraine trip part 3 - Lviv

Lviv, Lwow, Lvov, Leopolis. The coolest city in Ukraine, no contest. It is the cultural capital of Ukraine, due to its breathtaking architecture, healthy emphasis on the arts, delicious food and adoration of all things Ukrainian. In a country with a history of conflicted identity, Lviv is proud to be Ukrainian.

I sketched and painted Lviv a few times (not enough!)...The experimental Yupo piece above was part of a 20x20 show at a Sacramento gallery.

Coming back to Lviv was wonderful...We caught the perfect weather and, although very short, our visit felt like a rich experience.

We came by train, from Khmelnitskiy. It's only a couple of hours' ride and I took the opportunity to introduce my husband to the standard travel choice of most Ukrainians - "platzkart", or 2nd class. This is basically an open train compartment, with two lower bunks, two upper bunks and one more lower and upper across the aisle. Your feet stick out into the aisle. 

Another super traditional thing about this train ride - the mandatory hot tea in a glass with metal holder. Apparently, these things have been around since the late 18th century.

They are, of course, also highly sketchable :)

Once we got to Lviv, we had an airbnb place waiting for us. A loft in a tower, at the end of four or five stories of a spiral staircase. 

And the best thing about it? The view...

The view onto the city in the morning.

The view at night...

The view inside the 17th century Bernardine church seen in the previous photo.

..And the view into the inner courtyard.

We stayed close to the apartment - which is in the old town - which is where I wanted to be anyway. There's the Rynok square, the main tourist hangout with the city hall and the bell tower in the middle. The square is surrounded by something like fifty historical buildings, each unique but playing nicely with its quirky neighbors.

Among the new places, I got to visit the House of Legends - a multistory restaurant / museum of local urban legends. We dined on the rooftop and I scored a goal, shooting a coin into the chimney sweep's hat (this is supposed to bring you tons of luck).

The Chimney Sweep monument.

Another stop was the Fedorov square, which his the location of a long-standing book flea market. I was limited by the size of my luggage, exchanged money on hand and also a little bit of common sense - otherwise, I would have bought a lot of paper. And vinyl.

Here, I am holding the first issue of my favorite childhood magazine. Mr Ivan Fedorov, the first printer of a text in Church Slavonic, is looking over approvingly from the distance.

Also, I painted this guy before - in my Unity series.

And this place - St Olga's Cathedral - is my favorite painting out of the series. I waved at it as we were passing by.

We missed the festival of street music by a week or so but, this being Lviv, music happened on the street anyway. We just kind of wandered into this Ukrainian girls choir performance at the Rynok square.

This is just a very small, curated collection of images I brought home with me. I love the photo above, taken from the top of the House of Legends. I didn't think of it at the time, but this East-West pointing wind compass illustrates the historical predicament of my home country. Stuck between Russia and Poland, Ukraine has been a favorite site of many wars between the East and the West.

Ukrainians are not belligerent people. More like, conflict-avoidant - it takes a lot to tick us off. Which, I guess, attracts all sorts of conquerors thinking we're an easy win. It is really a mistake on their part...historically, Ukraine grew all kinds of rebels and militias in response to the bullying neighbors. 

At the same time, the Ukrainian national identity has also been a site of conflict, particularly after its independence in 1991: do we associate more with the former soviet countries and their mentality or do we jump head first into the Western culture? 

Anyway...I enjoyed the trip thoroughly. Hopefully, a longer stay next time. So much to see, so many things to sketch!

Highlights of my trip to Ukraine - Part 2

I grew up in a small city of Khmelnitsky in Western Ukraine. There isn't much that's exciting about it - it's a regional center, it has a river running through it and its main industry is shopping. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990s, jobs were scarce and local money quickly lost their value. The economy was in ruins. So a lot of people tried to make ends meet by reselling things, often brought in from a neighboring country. It was not uncommon to see a former white collar worker peddling Turkish bed linen or Polish shoes. Several marketplaces sprung up around the city and one of them grew to enormous proportions. This is now the 'tolkuchka' or 'tucha' - third largest marketplace in Europe (the nicknames refer to how crowded and cramped it gets and how you get pushed around when you're shopping). 

There are, of course, good things in Khmelnitskyy, like this little art gallery we wandered into.

Symphonic rock at a Ukrainian music venue.

There is a concert hall. A friend took us to a symphonic rock concert there. The music was okay, but sitting in the second row from the stage and watching the action with a sketchbook in my hand was fantastic.

So that's a little bit about my town. Let's say I was not sad to leave when I moved away to architecture school in Odessa (which is all the way on the other side of the country). But there is one thing this place has that I can't find anywhere else.

Enter Lara. Psychology professor, artist, writer, the most constant thing in my life (other than, arguably, my parents). My best friend. 

Lara in her kitchen. She bravely sat for me, while also talking up a storm :)

We met at the art school. She was 13, I was 12, and four hours a day three days a week we were together. We share love for art, creativity, humor and reading. She is way better at understanding the mysteries of human interaction. I am better at...math? She likes cats, I'm a dog person. She likes pastels, I am into watercolor. 

Where it all began: me with my friend Larisa, aka Lara, next to the building of our art school.

Lara is one of the main reasons I wanted to go back to Ukraine. We kept in touch through the 13 years I've been gone - good ol' snail mail at first, emails which she could only read at her university library computer, endless iterations of messengers and social networks. I would call her with a long distance call card and promise I would definitely come. Next year. 

And then I wouldn't keep that promise because transatlantic travel is expensive and children are little. 

So this time was surreal for both of us. I couldn't believe I did it, she couldn't believe I was really there, breathing the same air. It was amazing. We both worried that somehow, through distance and time apart, we became different people and those people would not connect. But we did connect - it was as if we only saw each other last week. 

Good friends like this are a treasure - I hope you have one, too. And if you don't, find one and build that relationship. It really can be something that sustains you and holds your head above the water when times are tough. Also, it's extra nice having a shrink for your best friend ;). Highly recommended for you creative types. 

Highlights of my trip to Ukraine - Part 1

This October will mark 14 years since my family and I crossed the ocean for the first time and moved to the United States. It is not an easy thing to leave a life you built and start again, from scratch, in the unknown. And the older I get, the more respect and awe I feel for the immigrants who risk everything in hopes of a better life for their children. It's a big deal.

The beautiful roof structure of the San Francisco International airport.

I was not happy to leave Ukraine and move who-knows-where when I was 22. It made no sense to me, and it was scary and it was stressful. I kept on a brave face but I felt like I was kidnapped and brought to this foreign country against my will. I was not forced into anything, of course, but at that point in my life, I just didn't know I had other options.

So, for the last 13 years, I've wanted to return. The significance and meaning of this return morphed over the years into something mystical. A pilgrimage. A return of the Jedi. A prodigal daughter homecoming.

And then, this May, I did it. My husband tagged along and I'm sure if was very different for him. For me, it was surreal. After such a long time, you begin to wonder if everything you knew from the life before even exists.

We flew out of San Francisco and into Istanbul, with a long layover there and then an early morning flight to Kiev. A similar arrangement on the way back - except, we had a few more hours of daylight to go glance at the Blue Mosque and the outside of Hagia Sophia. I did not have the time to sketch any of that. But during the first layover, I sketched a funky chandelier made out of a car tire and some rope. That's something, right? :)

A funky chandelier at a Turkish restaurant

On the whole, I expected to sketch so much more than I actually did. The trip was 10 days from leaving our house to arriving back to it, with a day and a half spent just on sitting in an airplane. Sure, you can also sketch while on the plane. And I did. Once:

Nunavut - Canadian Arctic Archipelago, apparently.

This looked like Greenland to me...but it turns out, it's a Canadian territory by the name of Nunavut. Live and learn!

Sketching at Istanbul airport. I made the drawing on the plane and then applied water to it on the ground (Drawing made with water-soluble LePen).

After Istanbul, we spent a day in Kiev and took a train to my hometown of Khmelnitskyy. I stayed with my best friend...this was also so strange and so wonderful. We met in art school, when I was 11 or 12 and have kept in touch ever since. She is now a psychology professor, married to another psychology professor. She kept trying to feed me. Everything. At once. Apparently, Ukrainian love is expressed with food!

Maidan, the main square of Kiev.

Ah, and the food. I have never been big on household tasks, including cooking, so I visit my mom if I feel the craving for some yummy Eastern European food. But having unrestricted access to cherry strudels and potato pancakes and Ukrainian cheesecake was amazing. 

Strudels and tea at Lvivski Plyatski in Khmelnitskyy.

One of the little cafes we visited in Ukraine was also a language club. Which is kind of a perfect combination of uses - study the irregular verbs all you like, while sipping coffee or a special "healthy smoothie" and nibbling on a "zapekanka" - Ukrainian cheesecake. Or strudel. More strudels in my life, please :D

Cafe Ola - a cafe and a language club.

Some people, undoubtedly discussing important linguistic matters while I sketched them. 

Julia Kay's Portrait Party, round 2

What is Julia Kay's Portrait Party, you ask? Well, you could go to the source and read all about it, but I'll give you a synopsis: it's a group on Flickr.com, made up of artists all over the world, who paint/draw/sculpt/create likenesses of other members of the same group. We share images of ourselves with each other and anyone can pick anyone else and make a piece of art (or a simple doodle) out of it. In short, it's a blast.

A while ago, I began participating in the group and a lot of my paintings of other artists were also part of my self-imposed a-portrait-a-day challenge. About half of all of the portraits I had in my solo show, FACES, were Julia Kay's Portrait Party portraits.

So, life went on and I occupied myself with other things. The Party also went on, new artists joined and left, members met in real life, held exhibitions and live portrait events, Julia wrote a book. And recently, I started feeling the itch again. The result are these portraits, done in a sketchbook or on a random piece of cardboard, with pen, watercolor, and in one case - white-out.

View fullsize

Claudia for JKPP

---

View fullsize

Philip for JKPP

---

View fullsize

Jan for JKPP

---

View fullsize

Julia Kay for JKPP

---

View fullsize

Teresa for JKPP

L'aquarelle with Le Pen

Well, peeps, time is slipping right through my fingers, and it's already, technically, fall. Which, of course, you couldn't tell if you were judging by our 100 F Sacramento weather. So, here's some visual memories about the summer and an update on my so very professional life.

View fullsize

This curiously shaped fruit caught my eye in my parents' garden, on a hot summer afternoon. Watercolor, Le Pen in Pentalic sketchbook.

I distinctly remember feeling, back in the beginning of the year, that there was no way I would have any less time to paint when I traded full time motherhood for a full time job outside the home. Boy was I wrong. 

The truth is, I don't necessarily have less time, but, rather, less energy. How is this possible? Did I sell the sacred nap hour-and-a-halves for lunch hours? And when does the intense drive to not do anything unless prompted by the kids when I get home from work end? 

The only thing that works now is going somewhere with the sole purpose of making some art, like figure drawing sessions or plein air paintouts. Maybe I need another self-imposed art project deadline?

View fullsize

A coworker of mine brought this big basket of fragrant lemons to the office. I took the basket outside in the sun and sketched it over lunch!

Meanwhile, even with my lackluster participation in the art world, things are happening. I recently participated in an Art X Architects show at the Sparrow Gallery here in Sacramento. My art made it onto the covers of publications and the pages of an online magazine. I debuted as a contributor to a actual real book that I can even hold in my hands (The Art of Crayon, link below). There has been at least three interviews with me published in the last year. The ball is, inexplicably, rolling, even though I'm very busy working on a different ball altogether. 

(Hmm...now I'm thinking about the dung beetles :D. Are you?)

Don't get me wrong, I love my job. I like being back on track to an architect's license. I like being able to provide for my family and grow in my career as an architect. It has been a very steep and exciting learning curve these past several months.

(The dung beetle, stubbornly pushing the ball up the steep hill)

And, the very shortage of art-making time tends to activate my creative hunger. It's good to take a step back and evaluate my goals in art, not driven by the necessity of making money. I get new ideas that I want to explore...I just don't know when. Maybe it's time to write the "How to Paint with Kids And a Full-Time Job" blog post!

Until then, do check out The Art of Crayon book. It's beautiful.

The Art of Crayon: Draw, Color, Resist, Sculpt, Carve!

$17.19

By Lorraine Bell

Buy on Amazon

Some Sketches for Creative Live's "28 to make"

If you are following me on Instagram (you should), you may have noticed some sketchy stuff going on lately. I sketch often, so it was really a no-brainer when I received an email invitation from Creative Live to sketch some more. Of course I would like to!

View fullsize

Prompt 1: Draw your beverage.

This first sketch was easy, because pretty much at any time, I have a cup of tea going. Especially when I'm feeling flu-ish and cold-ish, which is a lot in the last couple of months. Hence, my cup of tea with a slice of lemon floating just below the surface. In my favorite mug with detail of "A Slice of Earth" printed on it (you can get one for yourself here)

View fullsize

Prompt 2 - Draw a houseplant.

Next one was a bit of a challenge. Your regular houseplants without flowers do not excite me in the slightest. And I only have two of them, both miraculously surviving orchid plants. Which are not currently blooming. So I spiced things up with an orange LePen and played with a cropped composition. The weird worm-like roots spilling out of the pot helped, too :)

View fullsize

Prompt 3 - Draw some album art.

This one needs some explaining. When I think about album art, I think of my dad's vinyl collection (all left in Ukraine when we moved to the U.S., along with our books). And among the Pink Floyds and the Beatles, there were audio productions of children's stories, and among those, my favorite was this 1976 radioplay/musical adaptation of Alice in Wonderland by Vladimir Vysotskiy. I listened to this at night, before falling asleep. And I loved the gatefold sleeve it came with.

Here's also my album art sketch of one of my favorite music records:

View fullsize

Finally, the last prompt I did was 'draw what's inside your bag.'

View fullsize

I am at an awkward stage in life, between a diaper bag and ...who knows what. I have a gym bag, a going-to-the-library book bag, a camera bag, a plein air bag. But I don't have a go-to purse that would contain all of my essentials. Usually, I just bring my wallet and my keys, and if there's a chance that I might be able to steal some sketching time, I bring a sketchbook. So...I sketched my keys.

Compare and contrast this to my keys in early 2010:

View fullsize

No house key, because we were living at a friend's house back then, while shopping for our own house in the high desert. The little key was probably for a safe with important documents that I didn't want to get lost in the move. And of course, my American Institute of Architects membership card, proclaiming undying love for architecture (which is a topic for a whole 'nother blog post). Until then,

Yevgenia

Starbucks on a Sunday

I have very few "rituals," as they are known now (formerly "habits" ;) ) One of them is drinking tea first thing in the morning, with toast and, ideally, some reading. This has become harder and harder to accomplish after I started a family. I'm a proper introvert, I have to have alone time. If I don't, I become cranky and crabby and innocent bystanders suffer.

View fullsize

So I decided to make more room in my days for alone time. I get up before everyone and have my breakfast in peace, jog, work, think. One of these mornings, I jogged to the nearest coffee shop (which turned out to be a Starbucks, of course) and sketched. It was pure bliss!

View fullsize

If you're an artist, you may be wondering what is this light blue line that bleeds a mixes with paint. It is my absolute pleasure to introduce to you Le Pen. I love them.

Let's Get Things A Little Bit Messed Up

There's been a lot of monkeywrenching going on here and I have not been able to paint since Friday. Katia, my 3-year-old, broke her leg two weeks ago and is now sporting a pink cast. Ella, the 1-year-old, caught a stomach flu over the weekend, then promptly gave it to Katia. So it's been a rough few days (and nights).

30 Paintings in 30 Days is, therefore, on hold. Instead, I'm posting something I found while going through my old sketchbooks. These are some notes I took while watching a Charles Reid DVD.

View fullsize

And to illustrate these points, a sketch of my living room that I 'messed up" by allowing the red paint from the other page bleed onto it. And how about the not-quite-correct perspective? Lines intersecting where they shouldn't? Embrace it all :)

View fullsize

July Virtual Paintout - Santa Fe (and a little bit about Monterey)

I managed to squeeze in a Virtual Paintout last month. Not the almost-epic, half-sheet street scene like I did the month before, but a small and fast sketchbook spread. It still counts and I'm super proud of myself :) .

View fullsize

Street market in Santa Fe.

This is also supposed to become a video some time soon. As in, I have the footage of me sketching and painting it but I need it to be edited. By someone. If you know anyone, please send them my way.

This month, Virtual Paintout is in Monterey, CA, and there is no way I'm going to miss that! In fact, I may have to make another real life trip there for this purpose! We have already visited Monterey this year. Took all three kids to the aquarium and the beach. I wishfully bring sketchbooks pretty much anywhere we go, but of course, with a 5, 3, and 1-year old around, there is never a time to quietly sit down and sketch. Except, maybe, in the car. Which is what I did :)

View fullsize

Car sketch

View fullsize

Fruit stand. Started this one in the parking lot, added color at home.

And, of course, we took lots of photos. Here are some:

You can tell I am partial to jellyfish. And my kids.

Hang out with your fears

I've been working on my art business a lot lately. Well, as much of a lot as my full-time parenting gig allows me to. There are so many things I am excited about. There is a grand vision for the future. And I want to get there fast, like, right now!

View fullsize

Sketch of my son in his new red wagon.

And it's not going to happen. It will, but definitely not so very fast.

It's been five years since I began, at an empty and sweltering hot middle-of-nowhere swap meet, approaching my art practice as a business. It seems like such a long time and I feel that I should have been so much farther by now.

Yes, I have all kinds of excuses, but they don't help when I'm on my own and comparing myself with someone who, within the same time frame, is three steps ahead of me. They are getting featured everywhere and showing at the gallery I want to be in, while I'm changing diapers and cleaning up messes. It's very frustrating.

I know what you're thinking. Comparing yourself to others is pointless and only makes you feel worse. True. It's just, sometimes, you can't help it.

On the flip side of this, I am completely humbled by all the people (often older, with more life experience) who look up to me. Just yesterday, someone called me 'a real pro.' Who, me?

I guess maybe I am :)

I'm so pro that I can even draw stick figures. This one, for example, is from a book on anxiety I illustrated earlier this year:

View fullsize

Hang out with your fears.

I like this one. It makes me think about my fears (of failure, of missing out, of being a fraud, of not being a good enough mom and wife, of wasting my life) as little fuzzy monsters I can learn to live with.

Ed, Monet and Ira Glass

Recently, a quote really resonated with me:

“‘Claude Monet was nearing the height of the reputation he was to win during his lifetime, producing those water lily masterpieces, when he wrote this letter (in 1912) to his dealer and benefactor, Paul Durand-Ruel: “More than ever today, I realize how artificial is the undeserved fame I have won. I keep hoping to do better...” His latest exhibition was about to open in Paris. “I know beforehand that you’ll say my pictures are perfect. I know that when they are shown they will be much admired, but I don’t care because I know they are bad. I’m certain of it.””

— "Watercolor Bold and Free" by L.Goldsmith

View fullsize

The quote was so good I wrote it down in my sketchbook. The cool dude is my baby brother Ed :)

Monet thought his paintings were bad. Monet doubted himself not any less than I do. If you ask me, that's a good thing to know!

But is it a good thing? Talking about your paintings as being 'bad' is bad marketing. Humility doesn't sell very well. If an artist thinks his paintings are bad, what collector will buy them?

And yet we creative souls are particularly sensitive to our own critical voice. Through the nature of our work, we get to deal with it more than most other people. What makes a difference is how we deal with it:

1. Denial of the inner critic. I don't know if it's just me, but I get suspicious when I see an artist without any self-doubt. It seems fake when an artist believes he is a genius and his work is worth millions. It's almost like a performance...nay, that's probably what it is. And who knows what happens behind the scenes. Is it a genuine victory over the critic or is it a show you put on?
2. Giving up. This is the option that goes well with depression and insecurity. You pour your heart into your creative work, put it out there, and the viewer/listener/reader doesn't care. They don't buy your painting. 'Of course they don't,' chimes in your inner critic, 'It's bad and you are worthless.' It's incredibly hard to pick yourself up again and pour your heart out again. So you give up.
3. Accepting it and being motivated by it. You talk to your critic. 'No, my latest piece is not the best thing ever. I made a mistake here. I need to develop this idea more. I can be so much better.' And you know you have it in you to be better, you can see your work five years in the future. You know it will be hard and you will make more 'bad' art but you will get there.

You are in the 'Gap.'

Back to the sketching board

Sketchbooks are essential. There is no way around it. Sketching is like exercise, like meditation, like meditative exercise. Sketching is like yoga.

View fullsize

Pen sketch - part of our backyard. This pile of firewood was calling my name!

This may be why I sketch the same way I exercise...In cycles. Ideally, both would be a daily habit but instead, I do it for a while, burn out, lay low for a while, pick it up again. Every time I start again, it feels great and I wonder why I haven't been doing it. So, right now, I'm in the feeling-great stage of sketching. My illustrations gigs slowed down and I'm not looking to add new ones. The move and remodeling is mostly done. I can breathe a little bit. And sketching...sketching makes me breathe way slow. Nice, relaxed, yoga breaths. Inhale-2-3-4, exhale-2-3-4-5-6. Good.

I want more of it.

Art Before Breakfast: A Zillion Ways to be More Creative No Matter How Busy You Are

By Danny Gregory

Buy on Amazon

I recently read (more or less) three books that push for a daily art practice: The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, Daily Painting by Carol Marine, and Art Before Breakfast by Danny Gregory. All of them deserve a separate review but none offered me a concrete solution. Sure, I'd like to have 30 minutes of brain-dump writing first thing in the morning, and I love the idea of meditative sketching first thing in the morning...but mornings aren't working for me. I liked doing daily paintings for a month. I will probably try it again in September, after Elijah goes back to school and I figure out a way to coordinate everyone's schedules so that mine includes some reliable art-making hours. For now, I'm just surviving summer and take every sketching opportunity I can find.