From the Blog
In spaces like this, you see how it all comes together. A jumble of subject matter. A landscape here, a portrait there, a favorite pet. While there's something to be said for a striking collection focused on a particular theme, collections built over time—the ones with a bit of chaos—feel more personal. They tell you more about the collector. This is the art that resonated with them, not the art they thought would look good as a cohesive whole. Art for oneself, not for the ‘gram.
Baltimore got two feet of snow in January, and I haven't been to the studio in nearly a month. One thing after another — ice, an injury, client revisions, a deadline. It's given me a lot of time to think about time. Specifically, how you price it, how you lose it, and how ceramics has a way of reminding you that efficiency only goes so far.
Remember those boxes that arrived in December? I can finally show you what was inside—two puzzles I illustrated for eeBoo. The Sorcerer's Den is a 1000-piece puzzle featuring a cozy, colorful den with an Irish Wolfhound, trailing plants, crystals, and a library of magical ingredients. The second is the Explorers School of Magic, a 250-piece puzzle for kids with rooms full of creatures, dragon models, and floating cake carts.
Dinner conversation about fascism turned into an illustration about imperialism. Making political work while researching images I love—Gilded Age portraits, rococo excess, military regalia. Recognizing the beauty and the darkness tangled together.
The snow started Saturday evening and continued all day Sunday. We spent most of the day shoveling our pathway and our neighbors' sidewalks. This morning I walked Frisket through quiet streets. We looked out over the icy creek—fierce, and terrible, and beautiful. I called my senators. I'm donating what I can. I'm working on my business. I'm trying to hold all of it at once.
Underglaze is strange. It's like watercolor but also not at all like watercolor. They share the same binder—gum arabic—so you can thin them and mix them the same way. You have to work quickly. Bisqueware absorbs water even faster than cotton rag, each brushstroke disappearing into the clay almost immediately. Wet on wet is next to impossible. And you layer colors the same way, light to dark. You can overpaint light on dark, but when it fires, the dark underpainting bleeds through no matter how many layers you put down. Because the particles move and bleed into the glaze during heating. Because science.
I love old paintings. The feeling of standing in a museum, surrounded by exquisite art hung salon-style on jewel-toned walls. The Walters in Baltimore does this—grand rooms where paintings and curios are displayed the way they might have been in their time. Light peeking in from tall, shuttered windows. The cabinetry. The quiet. The sense of stepping into a world gone by.
It's the new year. 2026. I took the last two weeks off from blogging—Christmas and New Year's didn't need commentary from me, and I wanted to be cozy with family. Christmas at my sister-in-law’s. Post-Christmas travel to my dad’s house in Virginia. New Year's Eve at our place with friends. Watching the ball drop on 34th Street with the rest of the neighborhood. It felt right to step back.
Two boxes arrived this week from a client. Both containing finished work I can't show yet—can’t until January. The joys of being an illustrator.
They've been sitting under the bin of Christmas ornaments, still sealed. We're still catching up from a month of travel followed by Thanksgiving. And then of course there was the winter market. The next day we got our Christmas tree, and that night we noticed a leak in the basement.
I did it. I tabled at my first market.
A friend asked me how I'd measure success at the market. I had a number in my head—$1,000 would feel like success, though I had no idea if that was realistic. “In this economy?”
So I started thinking about how I wanted to feel instead. I wanted to feel good about selling things. To be motivated to keep going. Feels more important than any metric.
I've been sitting at the dining table with a sheet of price stickers, trying to figure out how to price the ceramics I'm taking to the market this weekend.
Friday night I sat in the handbuilding room at the Potters Guild with a sheet of price stickers and boxes of my ceramics. It was the night before the annual half price sale. Jen and Mack sat with me while I sorted through pieces I'd made over the years—many from before I became a member, when I was still figuring out how to work the clay. Heavy bottoms. Bowls that were more oval than round. A dish with a spec of kiln wash baked into the surface where it had fallen from the shelf above. Glaze that had dripped from someone else's piece onto mine mid-firing.