I’m putting my summer classes up here front and center this week. If you haven’t already signed up for one, what are you waiting for?

Each of these classes includes 4 or 5 days of art making, which in my experience radically shifts your perspective on both your creative practice and life. Set this time aside for yourself and enjoy the camaraderie and creativity that ensues.

• Freedom & Mark Making in Illustration at Sitka

  July 11th-14, 10:00am - 4:00pm

  Sitka Center For Arts & Ecology, Otis, OR

• Adult Summer Art Camp - Session 1

  Ulna Art Studio, Portland

  Dates: Monday - Friday, June 15th - June 19th

  Time: 10:00am – 2:30pm (lunch from 12:00-12:30)

• Adult Summer Art Camp - Session 2

  Ulna Art Studio, Portland

  Dates: Monday - Friday, July 6th - July 10th

  Time: 10:00am – 2:30pm (lunch from 12:00-12:30)

• Adult Summer Art Camp - Session 3

  Ulna Art Studio, Portland

  Dates: Monday - Friday, August 3rd - August 7th

  Time: 9:00am – 1:30pm (lunch from 12:00-12:30)

My dear friends,

I’m in Wisconsin painting a mural on the La Crosse Public Library. I got this opportunity through an old friend, Josh Doster, an incredible artist who teaches sculpture at the university here, and the funding through an incredible arts advocate and artist, Jacqui Marcou.

I’m two time zones away from my home in Portland, Oregon, where my son is with my mom and his dad. I miss my family, but I’m also excited to spend this time away, making art. I am here to paint a mural, talk at the university, meet with students and give a short class at the library. It’s a work trip. As I’ve gotten older (and maybe been responsible for more people than just myself when traveling) I’ve gotten more and more anxious about traveling. I have been trying to think through all the things I need for this trip for the past 2 months, giving myself ample time to research and order paint, practice using a VR headset to sketch a mural (my first time) and order the appropriate lift.

Somehow, I have been getting my life “under control” lately. Meaning, I have enough time to prepare for things, apply for opportunities, and don’t feel like a chicken running around with its head cut off. Is it because my kid is getting older and needs me less? Is it because I moved out from living with my partner (creating a little more buffer around parenting his kids, although I still consider myself their step parent)? Is it because I’ve learned to say no to more things or become more organized in my work habits? Probably some nuanced combination of all those things. I think it’s also me getting older and “wiser.” I put quotes around “wiser” because I don’t feel wise in a deep, embodied way, I just feel more stable, and that feels good.

This trip is work, but honestly feels a little bit like an artist residency. I find myself wanting to gush to you about cooking for myself…

Overnight oats with chia and flax seeds and blueberries! A big pot of lamb and rice and greens I’ve been eating off all week! Electrolyte beverage and health-food-store style fig newtons! Slicing my apples before I leave the house and dipping them in almond butter all day long!

…like feeding myself is some radical new evolution of being human, because for me it is. I still feel like I am barely getting out of chicken-nugget-goldfish-purgatory, where every meal was designed to the lowest common denominator: will they eat it?

I don’t need to interrupt my work—painting the mural—to pick up a kid, or attend a scheduled meeting. I get lost in audiobooks (more on those below) and gliding my paintbrush across the smooth surface of this concrete wall. I watch my bead of paint along the brush’s edge, trying to keep it under control, not letting it drip, but consistently spread its pigment across a smooth line. I do this for hours on end, some days 11 hours against the wall, stopping when it gets dark and my body feels too tired to go on. I feel like I’m addicted, I don’t want to stop. I told myself that if I sat down and wrote this newsletter quickly I could get back to the wall. I hate that I need to pause to use the bathroom. I go back to my airbnb and take a hot bath, making sure I sleep 8 hours so I can do it again tomorrow.

A sweet kiddo stopped by and pointed out to me that I had messed up in some places, but didn’t in others. I loved this, knowing that the last day of any mural I will be adding tiny pieces of blue tape to the wall to fix any smudges, areas that need a 3rd coat, or lines I don’t like. I repeat to myself that you can cover up anything with acrylic paint and wipe down any stray splatters that happen. Mistakes are fixable in a mural, although sometimes frustrating.

I can be loose and collaborative in my usual art practice, loving mistakes or things that happen outside of my control. But painting a mural I love working alone, tightly coloring in the lines, not worrying about other people. I’m a control freak, using tape and strategizing the placement of colors (light under dark, messy yellow lines to be covered by tight black lines later on). I’m working alone, although they offered me an accomplished and kind assistant, I don’t think I’ll need one. Things have gone well and I feel pretty certain I will finish before my hard deadline. I’ll be leaving town next Saturday and this wall that I’ve become intimate with over the past week will soon be two time zones away from me. I promise I’ll send you a finished photo, and more words next week, but for now, I’m going to get back to painting.

I hope you are taking care of yourself, feeding yourself well, physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Until next week, much love, Lettie Jane

Tidbits

• This past Saturday was the Kentucky Derby, as a native of the state and the daughter of a horse trainer, I still have to feel excited by this come-from-behind victory and the first female trainer to ever win the Derby.

• La Crosse is so cool! Look at the May Day flower parade that came by to say hi to me while I was on my lift.

  

• OH SLOW HORSES!!!! I loved this television so much I had to start listening to the books to soften the heartbreak of getting through the last season. This week I’ve listened to the following books by Mick Herron:

  • Slow Horses (book #1)

  • Dead Lions (book #2)

  • Bad Actors (book #8)

  These are read by Gerard Doyle who read the The Inheritance Cycle of books by Christopher Paolini, which I only recommend if you are a nerd like me, who loves YA high fantasy, dragons and a soothing British accent. Anyhow, I recognized his voice and could be read to bed by Gerard Doyle for years to come.

• I finished Lisa Congdon’s Art Inc. on audiobook. I first read this book almost 10 years ago. Since then, I’ve been recommending this book as a little bible for professionalizing your art career. I was pleasantly surprised to find out it stood the test of time, I would still recommend it! full disclosure, the audiobook did not have the little sidenotes by working artists on how they make making art work for them, which I really missed.

• I listened to The Black Wolf by Louise Penny. If you’ve been following along for a while you know I’ve read the other 20 books about Inspector Gamache, and will probably continue to do so because they are cottage-core mysteries that spend just a little extra time describing the cheeses the characters are eating. I did find this one slightly less riveting than past novels, perhaps because I was coming off my Slow Horses high.

• I liked reading this little article about yard ornaments, I love thinking about high/low art, kitsch and where the origins of mundane-seeming objects lay.

  Unnatural Heritage

  The American Flamingo, Part 1

  Good morning, earthlings…

  Read more

  14 days ago · 22 likes · 4 comments · Kirk Gordon

Happy Birthday To… (Artist of the Week)

Your probably know Keith Haring, he was born on May 4th, 1958, and has generated some of the most widely recognizable graphics in the world.

“Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.” - Keith Haring

“My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can.” - Keith Haring

It may come to you as no surprise that I love Keith Haring, and consider him one of my art ancestors, looking at his work and reading his words bring tears to my eyes, he is so constant and honest and heart forward.

Classes, etc.

• Intro To Colored Pencil Drawing (Sunday AM) May/June

  Dates: Sundays, May 17 - June 7 (4 weeks)

  Time: 10:00am – 1:00pm

• Deeper Drawing Sundays!!!! (MAY/JUNE)

  Dates: SUNDAYS, May 17th - June 21st

  Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

• May book club: Making Art and Making a Living by Mason Currey
  Date: Monday, May 25th, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

• June book club: Making Comics by Lynda Barry
  Date: Tuesday, June 23rd, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

• LINE TIME is a tiny recorded class whenever you need it.

Ways to Bring My Work Into Your Home

• Original Artwork

• Prints & Decks from Buy Olympia

The Bun Update is now behind a paywall, rewarding you kind folks who send money my way.

Bun Update

Delta airlines recently legalized bringing your bunnies on board the way you might bring a dog or a cat. (Side note, once on an airplane my stepson, who is dreadfully allergic to cats, was having an awful allergy attack, we didn’t know why until the person in front of him got off carrying a cat. Lesson learned, ask if there is a cat on board in the future.) I know some bunnies can travel, but ours definitely prefer to stay ON THE GROUND.

All this to say, I didn’t bring the companion of my heart, Jiji, with me to Wisconsin. I must settle instead for the odd cottontail sighting, keeping my eyes peeled at dusk and dawn for these magical creatures to bless me with their brief and hypervigilant appearance.

My dear friends,

I have been a competitive person in the past. Competition can help a person be driven towards success, but for me, it’s also been a barrier to connection and understanding. Being better (or worse) than another person means setting yourself above or below them. This mindset, especially when it comes to creating art, makes me feel insecure, like I always need to prove myself. I’ve been working for years to rewire my brain for interdependence: recognizing that we each have unique strengths and weaknesses. Even those strengths and weaknesses have seasons, periods when we are sick, under-resourced, or just out of practice, and periods when we feel incredibly capable or generous. I don’t need to make a value judgement on that.

Like so many life lessons these days, I’m getting a new, heavy dose of feedback around being competitive from my kid. I don’t know if this is a trait inherited from me biologically or through exposure, but my kiddo is competitive. When we play games together I repeat the mantra “the winner is the person who has the most fun,” trying to remind him that the reason we are playing isn’t to prove ourselves, but to have fun. It doesn’t entirely work, but it helps. Why even play the game if losing ruins your day?

I’ve also started repeating this mantra in my art classes. So many of us have been exposed to the idea of hierarchy in everything that we do. So much so that we forget there is no winning in art. I am sometimes so powerfully inspired or jealous of another artist’s work that it stops me in my tracks. I’m ready to quit! Perfection has already been achieved! That might, at first, make me feel like that artist is better than me, but then I remind myself we are each on our own path, and I can only make art from my own perspective.

I don’t make art to be at the top of the heap of artists (whatever that would even look like) but because it soothes my nervous system, creates a mirror for me to explore my emotions, and allows me to connect to other people more authentically. How could someone be better than someone else at that?

When I was in art school I remember having this mental shift in our critiques when I realized that I would actually learn more if I asked more questions and gave less feedback. I still love to give feedback, but asking questions about art has continued to deepen my relationship to my own practice and my students’.

There is room for everyone to make art. You can make art if it isn’t realistic, you can make art if you don’t have fancy materials, you can make art if it’s a ball of clay on the side of the river. You can call it art or you can say “I just like to doodle.” If something in the process of moving materials brings you joy, just remember that the person having the most fun wins, and follow your fun.

Until next week, much love, Lettie Jane

Tidbits

• I finished Breesa Culver’s U.P. Dream Days (that’s a link to purchase). Technically this is a travel guide to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, but I enjoyed it like a novel. Perhaps because Breesa is my dear friend, perhaps because the book is a perfectly handheld size with soft pages and sweet illustrations, but sitting down each evening and traveling through the beaches, co-ops, and swimming holes of this place I’ve never been was the perfect reality escape.

• U.P. Dream Days married so nicely with listening to I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger, which mostly takes place on a sailboat in Lake Superior. The book is set vaguely in the future, maybe 50-100 years from now. However, this isn’t the robot-and-steel future or the dystopian-Parable-Of-The-Sower future, but a time when infrastructure has broken down and the class divide renders such different realities that they call the upper class “astronauts.” Despite tragedy and darkness bordering on dystopia, there is a strain of kindness and goodness running through this book that brought me hope. This book helped me envision a future where humans might continue to create community, despite the awfulness of it all.

• I reread The Creative Act by Rick Rubin for Ulna’s Book Club. I loved this book when I listened to it two years ago, but since have heard that some folks don’t like it, or even that Rubin has a right wing agenda. (I investigated, and he has twice retweeted some weird right wing things, but follows and interviews people across the political spectrum, and I didn’t find evidence that he directly supported, verbally or financially, any political candidate). I read the physical copy this time around and still loved it. I love that he validates creativity in all its many forms, as a deeply human act and desire.

• Have you watched Slow Horses on Apple TV? I had a cold this past week and spent two days laying in bed and watching the first three seasons. (My kiddo was with his dad, and then I let him play video games.) In some ways, it reminded me of reading I Cheerfully Refuse as a futurist novice with a deeply human vibe, this feels like a crime/spy series that shows mistakes, farts, and challenging interpersonal relationships.

• This month’s playlist is heavily influenced by Stranger Things. Our family finished Season five, and yes I cried, and no it was not anti-climatic, or wrapped up too quickly. It was epic and wonderful, and honestly I liked Season five almost as much as Season one.

Artist of the Week

Yves Klein was born April 28, 1928.

Is anyone else feeling obsessed by this intensely blue blue recently? Thank you Yves Klein.

“I did not like the nothing, and it is thus that I met the empty, the deep empty, the depth of the blue.” - Yves Klein

“Blue suggests the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.” - Yves Klein

Classes, etc.

• Intro To Colored Pencil Drawing (Sunday AM) May/June

  Dates: Sundays, May 17 - June 7 (4 weeks)

  Time: 10:00am – 1:00pm

• Deeper Drawing Sundays!!!! (MAY/JUNE)

  Dates: SUNDAYS, May 17th - June 21st

  Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

• May book club: Making Art and Making a Living by Mason Currey
  Date: Monday, May 25th, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

• June book club: Making Comics by Lynda Barry
  Date: Tuesday, June 23rd, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

• LINE TIME is a tiny recorded class whenever you need it.

Summer Classes!!! Join me for multiple days of art making this summer.

• Freedom & Mark Making in Illustration at Sitka

  July 11th-14, 10:00am - 4:00pm

  Sitka Center For Arts & Ecology, Otis, OR

• Adult Summer Art Camp - Session 1

  Ulna Art Studio, Portland

  Dates: Monday - Friday, June 15th - June 19th

  Time: 10:00am – 2:30pm (lunch from 12:00-12:30)

• Adult Summer Art Camp - Session 2

  Ulna Art Studio, Portland

  Dates: Monday - Friday, July 6th - July 10th

  Time: 10:00am – 2:30pm (lunch from 12:00-12:30)

• Adult Summer Art Camp - Session 3

  Ulna Art Studio, Portland

  Dates: Monday - Friday, August 3rd - August 7th

  Time: 9:00am – 1:30pm (lunch from 12:00-12:30)

Ways to Bring My Work Into Your Home

• Original Artwork

• Prints & Decks from Buy Olympia

The Bun Update is now behind a paywall, rewarding you kind folks who send money my way.

Read more

This weekend, I got to participate in a Big Ink print event for my fourth time. Like the past couple of times I attended, I attended the event at Whitaker Printmakers in Eugene, OR, where they have a gigantic Ray Trayle press.

I will sign up for Big Ink every time they come to Eugene (a 2 hour drive from Portland) because I love having the accountability to carve these big pieces of wood, and because Lyell Castonguay is a craftsman who always makes my prints look great.

I started feeling a little sick (throat scratchy, and headache) the night before this big day. I attended, had my prints made, but stayed masked and left early. It’s a bummer to have been under the weather for an event that happens only every two years, but I’m so delighted and grateful that I could still attend and have my prints made.

Here are few photos from 2024 when I made the print I titled What Goes Up Must Come Down.

This is from 2022 when I participated in collaboration with my friend, Guy De Martelet.

The next photos are from the first time I participated, in 2020.

Back to this year’s woodblock. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to carve, so I started flipping through sketchbooks.

The drawing on the right was something that would stop me each time I would flip past it. It captured something I was feeling, upside down, constricted.

I projected the image onto my painted sheet of MDF plywood and roughly sketched in the image with black paint. I didn’t love the result.

I used my iPad and procreate to mock up some other versions of the image, first creating a sort of seat for the figure, then adding the person on the opposite sketchbook page.

I think every figure in every image I make is me. They are all expressions of something I’m feeling, something I don’t really have words for. There is something about parenting, and letting go of parenting, and reparenting. I have a new baby nephew who looks so much like my little brother when he was a baby. I tried to squeeze them into the carving, my baby brother felt like my baby when I was 6 years old (I was not a kid drawn to dolls or caretaking, but still feel intense love when I see my brother as a baby. My sisters were born when I was age 2, 4, and then much later, 16.)

Carving a wood block is really, really fun. This is what it looks like in a timelapse:

I use a Ryobi electric carving knife. This is what it looks (and sounds) like in real time:

I think the final result is beautiful and creepy. I’ve been considering calling it Reparenting, but I usually let a title sit for a little bit to make sure that’s what it is.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this image-driven journey through my giant woodblock prints.

Until next week, much love, Lettie Jane

Artist of the Week

Bridget Louise Riley was born April 24, 1931.

"The actual basis of colour is instability. Once you accept that in lieu of something which is stable, which is form, you are dealing with something which is unstable in its basic character, you begin to get a way of dealing with it." - Bridget Riley

"I work on two levels. I occupy my conscious mind with things to do, lines to draw, movements to organize, rhythms to invent. In fact, I keep myself occupied. But that allows other things to happen which I'm not controlling... the more I exercise my conscious mind, the more open the other things may find that they can come through." - Bridget Riley

Classes, etc.

• Intro To Colored Pencil Drawing (Sunday AM) May/June

  Dates: Sundays, May 17 - June 7 (4 weeks)

  Time: 10:00am – 1:00pm

• Deeper Drawing Sundays!!!! (MAY/JUNE)

  Dates: SUNDAYS, May 17th - June 21st

  Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

• May book club: Making Art and Making a Living by Mason Currey
  Date: Monday, May 25th, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

• June book club: Making Comics by Lynda Barry
  Date: Tuesday, June 23rd, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

• LINE TIME is a tiny recorded class whenever you need it.

Summer Classes!!! Join me for multiple days of art making this summer.

• Freedom & Mark Making in Illustration at Sitka

  July 11th-14, 10:00am - 4:00pm

  Sitka Center For Arts & Ecology, Otis, OR

• Adult Summer Art Camp - Session 1

  Ulna Art Studio, Portland

  Dates: Monday - Friday, June 15th - June 19th

  Time: 10:00am – 2:30pm (lunch from 12:00-12:30)

• Adult Summer Art Camp - Session 2

  Ulna Art Studio, Portland

  Dates: Monday - Friday, July 6th - July 10th

  Time: 10:00am – 2:30pm (lunch from 12:00-12:30)

• Adult Summer Art Camp - Session 3

  Ulna Art Studio, Portland

  Dates: Monday - Friday, August 3rd - August 7th

  Time: 9:00am – 1:30pm (lunch from 12:00-12:30)

Ways to Bring My Work Into Your Home

• Original Artwork

• Prints & Decks from Buy Olympia

The Bun Update is now behind a paywall, rewarding you kind folks who send money my way.

Read more

Hello my friends,

How is your heart? Your head? Your hands?

Today, I’m struck by Annie Dillard’s famous quote: How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

It reminds me that life is not a sprint, it’s a marathon, a marathon where everyone has different end points, and plenty of side quests. There is some solace in that quote. Not only is it about prioritizing what you do with your days, but also about celebrating baby steps. Taking the next right step is all you need to do, and slowly, over time, you will have made a journey.

When I was growing up, my horse-trainer father would often tell me today is a good day to die as he swung his leg over a horse. This was possibly traumatic for me, but my dad is a jovial, delusional optimist. I understood (and I honestly can’t remember if he explained it this way) that what he meant was he was living in such a way that he made the most of his life every day. This was death as motivation to be where you wanted with your life. I am still terrified of my dad dying, I will miss him terribly, and have sobbed just at the thought. Losing any dear one—parent, partner, friend, child, or animal—can be gut wrenching and heartbreaking. Some of these heartbreaks I haven’t experienced or fully fathomed, some I have. I evoke my dad’s words not to make light of death, but to bring his delusional optimism and joie de vivre forth as another touchstone for living. My dad’s other refrain was today is the last [April 15th, 2026] you will ever have, what are you going to do with it?

This idea that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives feels more relevant as I age. I have begun to notice how many of my friend’s lives are made up not of grand gestures, but of tiny, incremental versions of showing up again and again. The careers that accumulate, the homes and gardens that grow and change, the volunteer hours, the emotional skills, languages, hobbies, and collections that accrue. I can see the choices friends have made over the course of a decade that helped bring them to where they are today. I might wish that I knew how to rewire a house or care for the feet of the houseless population, but are those skills I wanted to spend my days learning? No, I simply wish I had the outcomes of those hours, the instant download of knowledge. Wishing for someone else’s life does not take into account all the steps they took to create that life.

I’m offering myself some combination of these two pieces of advice today. Somewhere in between what you do with your days…and today is a good day to die, there is the permission to keep changing and adapting to who I want to be in the world, based on my priorities. I can adjust my actions everyday. If I make a mistake, I can address it, change, and keep orienting towards my goals: kindness, being in relationship, making art. I can show up available to have hard conversations, or simply be kind and curious to someone I haven’t seen in a while. I can say no to things I don’t have capacity for, and bring my art supplies home so I can paint at the kitchen table. I am in charge of my days and my life, and when they do not feel like they are my own, I can adjust. Heartbreak is real, loss might be recent or impending, and this is our one precious life, made up of each hour and each day. Each moment is an opportunity to turn towards who I want to be, to tune into who you might want to be.

Wherever you are this week, I hope you are finding your way, through your days and your life, with joy and heartbreak.

Until next week, much love, Lettie Jane

Tidbits

• Ahhhhhh, I finished the graphic novel Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls and it was so good. It’s the only graphic novel to ever win a Pulitzer Prize. It digs into Chinese history through Hull’s experience of family history and trauma, from China to Hong Kong to California. It’s riveting and beautiful. I always want to read history through an emotional lens and an individual’s story.

• Oliver Burkeman’s email this week was a reframe on seeing the news as the reality of the world:

  I mean, step back for one moment and consider the absolute outrageousness of the idea that focusing on the concretely real in this way – on looking people in the eye or walking in the woods, on building organisations or solving problems, on bringing creative works into the world or paying attention to your kids – that any of this somehow automatically constitutes “retreating” or “disengaging” or “looking away” from reality!

Artist of the Week

Howardena Pindell was born born April 14, 1943.

“Circles are an iconic form: the sun, the moon, the Earth, the planets. After I started using them in my work, I remembered a time drinking root beer with my dad as a child. It was during segregation, when it was court-mandated that utensils had to be designated whether someone of colour could use them; they painted huge red dots under the mugs.” - Howardena Pindell

Classes, etc.

• Intro To Colored Pencil Drawing (Sunday AM) May/June

  Dates: Sundays, May 17 - June 7 (4 weeks)

  Time: 10:00am – 1:00pm

• Deeper Drawing Sundays!!!! (MAY/JUNE)

  one more to get a 10% discount

  Dates: SUNDAYS, May 17th - June 21st

  Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

• April book club:

  Book Club: The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
  Date: Monday, April 20th
  Time: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

• LINE TIME is a tiny recorded class whenever you need it.

Summer Classes!!! Join me for multiple days of art making this summer.

• Freedom & Mark Making in Illustration at Sitka

  July 11th-14, 10:00am - 4:00pm

  Sitka Center For Arts & Ecology, Otis, OR

• Adult Summer Art Camp - Session 1

  Ulna Art Studio, Portland

  Dates: Monday - Friday, June 15th - June 19th

  Time: 10:00am – 2:30pm (lunch from 12:00-12:30)

• Adult Summer Art Camp - Session 2

  Ulna Art Studio, Portland

  Dates: Monday - Friday, July 6th - July 10th

  Time: 10:00am – 2:30pm (lunch from 12:00-12:30)

• Adult Summer Art Camp - Session 3

  Ulna Art Studio, Portland

  Dates: Monday - Friday, August 3rd - August 7th

  Time: 9:00am – 1:30pm (lunch from 12:00-12:30)

Ways to Bring My Work Into Your Home

• Original Artwork

• Prints & Decks from Buy Olympia

The Bun Update is now behind a paywall, rewarding you kind folks who send money my way.

Read more

Hello my friends,

I am lucky, privileged, and grateful to make art for a living. Like any job, there are plenty of things I do for work that I don’t like doing. Working for myself means there are many things I do that are not directly income generating. I do things that I hope might generate income (promotion, networking, preparing a canvas, or even making a painting), and I do things that can’t directly generate income but I feel like I need to do for myself (sketchbooks, running artist business club), and I do things I don’t particularly want to do, but have to (taxes, website updates, class listings, photographing my work, applications, emails).

This week while doing some of the things I would rather not do (packaging up my artwork) I paused to look at a piece I made two years ago and decided it needed just a little more purple. I was under a time constraint, and it was absolutely ridiculous to pick up a paint palette and add fresh paint to this painting before packing it, but I did it anyway.

My whole body relaxed in that moment and I was filled with the sensation I get when I make art, some combination of excitement, presence, and relaxation. There is something grounding, and something that makes the rest of the whole world disappear. I did not succumb to the feeling entirely, but only laid a few strokes of brighter purple on the work, and continued to package the other artwork I was transporting. I thought to myself this is it, this is why I do all the other bullshit I don’t want to do, just for that one single feeling of art-joy.

Of course, I struggle even during the supposedly wonderful part of art making. I can be self-critical, frustrated when my projects aren’t working, or get in my head about why, or who will like them. That is real and it’s there, but the other thing, the high of art-joy is strong enough to keep me coming back. Through negative self talk, taxes, applying for things I don’t get, feeling like a fool, and self doubt, I just can’t let go of the high of making something I like.

I’d love to go back to talking about the piece I laid a bit of paint on, it’s called Midnight Gardener. It was originally from the group of paintings I made in 2024 called Messy Bodies. I was exploring abstract mark-making and figures trapped in rectangles, distorted, comfortable and uncomfortable. This piece was one of three 6’ x 2.5’ canvases.

I still feel excitement thinking about my process making these paintings. I love a feeling of chaos and control, and each of these embodied that.

These photos aren’t great, they were progress shots from my studio, I cropped the photos to focus on the paintings that would become Midnight Gardener. You can see its abstract beginning on the left, and the first day I blocked in the the negative space, pulling a figure out of the abstraction, on the right.

I love to play spot the difference and find the way this paintings evolved in the photographs above. It’s hard to imagine how the figure shifted from pink and green to purple and blue, but you can see the beginnings of the change on the right, as I add a few brown blobs onto the figure. A lot happened between a few brown blobs and the predominantly purple and blue figure, I don’t have the evolution in photographs, but I do have a time-lapse video.

If you have 25 seconds, you can watch me move from one of these pieces to another and back again, shifting the color palettes as I go.

I documented the shifts in the painting, from changing the color palette, to adding the plant in the leg. The image on the right was the evolution that finally hung in The Fresh Pot, where I had this art show.

I didn’t sell the painting and brought it back to the studio, where it lived alongside other works in progress.

Artwork migrates around my studio, from one side of the room to the other, from the floor to the wall, from a drawer to a frame.

Midnight Gardener received a few intermittent updates. I added green to the face and the hand, I drew one green circle with an oil stick.

This photo shows light coming across the painting and highlights the textured gel medium I used, all those gritty little bits creating friction across the surface. The cracks under the paint come through because under this painting is an oil painting. Almost anyone will tell you you can’t paint acrylic over oil, I gessoed the hell out of the canvas and hoped for the best, but this is the result, there is some cracking.

Buy this painting from me! Make me stop adding to it! Or perhaps I’ll bring it back to the studio and alter the color scheme again, one brush stroke at a time, because it feels good.

Wherever you are this week, I hope you find one brushstroke’s moment of joy.

Until next week, much love, Lettie Jane

Tidbits

• This article How to include kids without centering them by Priya Parker.

• I was riveted by the Serial series The Idiot, where one cousin reports on another who put a hit out on his ex-wife and got caught.

• I’ve got a profile in Willamette Week - you can read it here: Lettie Jane Rennekamp Thinks In Shapes And Colors.

Artist of the Week

Phyllida Barlow was born on April 4th, 1944 and died March 12, 2023 (aged 78).

Barlow taught at Slade School of Art for more than 40 years, but didn’t begin to get serious recognition as an artist until she was in her 70s.

Maybe I don’t think enough about beauty in my work because I’m so curious about other qualities, abstract qualities of time, weight, balance, rhythm; collapse and fatigue versus the more upright dynamic notions of maybe posture ... the state that something might be in. Is it growing or shrinking, is it going up or down, is it folding or unfolding?

— Phyllida Barlow, The Guardian, 2016.

If you want to know more, I recommend the Guardian article Bish-bash-bosh: how Phyllida Barlow conquered the art world at 73

Classes, etc.

• Intro To Colored Pencil Drawing (Sunday AM) May/June

  Dates: Sundays, May 17 - June 7 (4 weeks)

  Time: 10:00am – 1:00pm

• Deeper Drawing Sundays!!!! (MAY/JUNE)

  10% discount if you sign up a month before class starts

  Dates: SUNDAYS, May 17th - June 21st

  Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

• April book club:

  Book Club: The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
  Date: Monday, April 20th
  Time: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

• LINE TIME is a tiny recorded class whenever you need it.

Summer Classes!!!

• Freedom & Mark Making in Illustration at Sitka

  July 11th-14, 10:00am - 4:00pm

  Sitka Center For Arts & Ecology, Otis, OR

• Adult Summer Art Camp - Session 1

  Ulna Art Studio, Portland

  Dates: Monday - Friday, June 15th - June 19th

  Time: 10:00am – 2:30pm (lunch from 12:00-12:30)

• Adult Summer Art Camp - Session 2

  Ulna Art Studio, Portland

  Dates: Monday - Friday, July 6th - July 10th

  Time: 10:00am – 2:30pm (lunch from 12:00-12:30)

• Adult Summer Art Camp - Session 3

  Ulna Art Studio, Portland

  Dates: Monday - Friday, August 3rd - August 7th

  Time: 9:00am – 1:30pm (lunch from 12:00-12:30)

Ways to Bring My Work Into Your Home

• Original Artwork

• Prints & Decks from Buy Olympia

Footnotes:

Why it’s hard for women to say no: https://www.thethoughtfulco.net/post/the-no-woman

The Bun Update is now behind a paywall, rewarding you kind folks who send money my way.

Read more

Intuitive Drawing is a weekly newsletter about creative work and being human. As always, take what you need and leave the rest.

Before we get started this week, I want to tell you about the classes I’m teaching this summer. I just released 3 adult summer camps at my studio, plus one 4 day get away at Sitka. These camps are SO FUN: we experiment with materials, eat lunch together, and draw everyday for 5 days in a row.

• Freedom & Mark Making in Illustration at Sitka

  July 11th-14, 10:00am - 4:00pm

  Sitka Center For Arts & Ecology, Otis, OR

• Adult Summer Art Camp - Session 1

  Ulna Art Studio, Portland

  Dates: Monday - Friday, June 15th - June 19th

  Time: 10:00am – 2:30pm (lunch from 12:00-12:30)

• Adult Summer Art Camp - Session 2

  Ulna Art Studio, Portland

  Dates: Monday - Friday, July 6th - July 10th

  Time: 10:00am – 2:30pm (lunch from 12:00-12:30)

• Adult Summer Art Camp - Session 3

  Ulna Art Studio, Portland

  Dates: Monday - Friday, August 3rd - August 7th

  Time: 9:00am – 1:30pm (lunch from 12:00-12:30)

This coming Saturday the next session of Deeper Drawing begins. Come make art with me 4 Saturdays in a row for the month of April:

• Deeper Drawing Mini (April 2026)

  Dates: Saturdays, April 4th -April 25th (4 classes)

  Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

Dearly Beloved,

What does it mean to show up right now?

Does that mean sitting down and wrangling out this newsletter? Does that mean going to the event you said you’d attend, even though you are tired? Does that mean protesting, making phone calls, talking to your friends about the hard things happening in the world?

I’ve been trying to write a newsletter about the word flaky. Someone called me flaky once, because I was making a huge change that they didn’t agree with. It stuck with me, this criticism, I don’t want to be flaky! I still think that making that change was the right move, but I could have persisted. I could have continued on that path, and potentially be somewhere else in my life now.

When I look up the word, I find that it can it be spelled two ways: either flaky or flakey. That feels ironic, can the word even commit to one spelling? Merriam Webster has two definitions for flaky as an adjective: markedly odd or unconventional and not reliable in performance or behavior.

In my personal internal work around shame and self-abandonment I’ve been trying to reframe all sorts of words and phrases with more compassion for myself. Shoulds become coulds, and why can’t you just get over that? becomes what else is in there? When I read that first dictionary definition of flaky: markedly odd or unconventional, my body relaxed. I like being markedly odd and unconventional! I can be that kind of flaky!

I wanted to reclaim the word flaky by celebrating the flakiness of a croissant or a Butterfinger. Everyone knows they want a croissant that breaks apart into a million little pieces, and Bart Simpson would like you not to lay a finger on his Butterfinger. But, this metaphor felt like a long stretch. Yes, a Butterfinger is reliably peanut-butter-sugar-goodness, but what does that have to do with canceling plans last minute or upending my whole life because I felt like I needed to? Markedly odd on the other hand, well, that just means that someone’s decision might not be understood by an outsider. How can an outsider decide your life for you anyhow? They don’t have all the information, you do.

I don’t want to be unreliable, but I do want to be someone who is allowed to pivot, change, adapt, and make decisions that might be hard for outsiders to understand. I’m down with being markedly odd or unconventional. I want to show up when I have capacity to show up, and I want other people to know that I will do what I said I would do. But I probably won’t follow the rule book when it comes to making a traditional life. I want to show up reliably for others, but I must be reliable to myself too. Sometimes that might make me look like a crumbly, flaky Butterfinger, and that’s okay, because who doesn’t love a Butterfinger?

Until next week, much love, Lettie Jane

Artist of the Week

Ruth Asawa’s birthday was January 24th, but I’d like to celebrate her this week. She had 6 children. SIX CHILDREN ya’ll and she made art every single day. This compelling, 15-minute mini-documentary interviews some of her adult children in their childhood home and really highlights the way she wove art into everything.

I’m really concerned with how much I can pack into one day than into 9 months or one year. I’m really concerned with every single day. When you put a seed in the ground, the ground doesn’t say, well in 8 hours I’m going to stop growing. You put it in the soil, that bulb grows every second it’s attached to the earth. That’s why I think every minute that we’re attached to this earth, we should be doing something. - my favorite quote from Ruth Asawa in this video.

Tidbits

• I finished All The Way To The River by Elizabeth Gilbert. Other folks have said this before, but having an incredibly famous and well established author write about her own Love and Sex addiction, her road to recovery, and working a 12-step-program was truly eye opening. Yes, I identify some of these behaviors in myself, and can see the ways codependency has been a way to search for answers in other people. This was an earth-shaking read for me.

• I read Get The Picture by Bianca Bosker. The first part of this book was really hard to read, as an artist and art lover. Bosker “infiltrates” the art world to find out how it works, and it begins with the kind of snotty, white-cube New York gallery that shuts most people (myself included) out. Stay with it though, Bosker finds her way to loving art deeply and radically, and you will too.

• Jolyn sent me this article: The Kids Are Alright - the brass tacks of which is that kids these days have more emotional literacy, are kinder, and more tolerant of other people.

• What Is Your Emergency? This This American Life episode aired back at the end of January, but I inly recently listened to it. I found myself silently weeping that this is where we are.

• I haven’t been sharing my playlists recently, if you are using Spotify, I make one every single astrological cycle. Aquarius Season this year was all Heated Rivalry and protest songs, Pisces Season was some new things alongside some old hits, and Capricorn Season starts slow and gentle but includes John and Yoko’s anti-war anthem disguised as a Christmas song.

When futzing around to share those, I found myself listening to this old playlist and reeeeaally enjoying it:

Classes, etc.

• STARTS SATURDAY!

  Deeper Drawing Mini (April 2026)

  Dates: Saturdays, April 4th - April 25th (4 classes)

  Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

• Intro To Colored Pencil Drawing (Sunday AM) May/June

  Dates: Sundays, May 17 - June 7 (4 weeks)

  Time: 10:00am – 1:00pm

• Deeper Drawing Sundays!!!! (MAY/JUNE)

  10% discount if you sign up a month before class starts

  Dates: SUNDAYS, May 17th - June 21st

  Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

• April book club:

  Book Club: The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
  Date: Monday, April 20th
  Time: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

• LINE TIME is a tiny recorded class whenever you need it.

Ways to Bring My Work Into Your Home

• Original Artwork

• Prints & Decks from Buy Olympia

Footnotes:

Why it’s hard for women to say no: https://www.thethoughtfulco.net/post/the-no-woman

The Bun Update is now behind a paywall, rewarding you kind folks who send money my way.

Read more

Greetings friends,

I make art for my job.

I go to work while my kiddo goes to school, Monday to Friday, 8:30 am - 2:30 pm. I teach on Saturdays, from roughly 8:00 am to 5:00 pm. I write my newsletter on Sundays. This coming week, when you’ll be reading this newsletter, will be the children’s Spring Break. We are planning to house-sit my friend’s home and chickens, and binge-watch Stranger Things.

As a side note, I just want to say that as a parent, things have shifted hugely over the past two years. My kiddo is 11, my stepsons 11 & 12, and my partner’s daughter is 16. None of them need babysitters anymore. It is wild to go from scrambling to cover a one hour meeting when school is out, to saying see you in an hour to my very responsible kiddo. Childcare, which has RULED MY LIFE for the past decade, is no longer the metric that makes or breaks my day.

Back to making art as my job. My “work” can mean many things. When things feel straightforward, each day of the work week might be physically painting a mural in person.

This past week, during the 30 hours my kid spent at school, I finished a small painting commission, created a small sign design, sold one painting on my website, had coffee with one artist-friend, and went for a walk with another. I worked on two personal projects: a big woodblock that I’ll be printing in April, and a copy or an update of a drawing I did 20 years ago. It feels rare to have made time for personal projects, it’s something that usually gets pushed aside while I work towards something with more financial urgency.

This photo shows my giant woodblock from 2024 next to the one I am currently working on, and on the right, the big personal drawing. I am certain I’ll write more about the woodblock and my design process after printing it on April 19th.

The big personal drawing might not be something I finish, but dear lord, is it giving me pleasure. I want to work on it all the time! I want to work on it right now, but I’m writing you a newsletter.

When I was 22 and in my last year of art school, I slowly made the original drawing, which is a giant color wheel with names for all the colors. I think I was inspired by the Crayola crayon names like Purple Mountains Majesty and Macaroni and Cheese, but the names attached to the colors became more poetry, self-reference, and a catalogue of my interests than ways of describing color.

When I read I started out on Burgundy or agronomy I don’t remember why I wrote those, or what I was reading or thinking at the time. But when I read Gentle On My Mind or Dill Harris, I am awash in nostalgia, loving that song, nicknaming my dear one that name, Truman Capote’s alias from To Kill A Mockingbird. I based the structure on the number of my age. I was 22 years old so the color wheel had 44 rows with 22 colors in each row, resulting in 968 colors. I’m 44 years old now, with 44 rows and 44 colors in each row. Do I want to mix and color in 1936 colors and make 1936 names? I don’t know. I just know that I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and this week, with a little extra time on my hands, I started it.

When I look at this, I think I am an insane person. With all that goes on in the world, with all the tasks I could be doing—bookkeeping, making a dentist appointment, making a mammogram appointment, helping my step son with homework, writing my will, checking my budget, stockpiling food, making chili oil, fixing my bike, writing postcards to friends, asking my landlord for a key to my garage since I’ve lost mine—I have chosen to spend my precious, free hours on this. A drawing that I don’t have a show for, a drawing I am not sure I will be able to, or want to sell. A drawing that many could say is pointless.

I’ve been fighting against the inner voice that says it’s pointless for many years now. I don’t even have a great response, maybe art is pointless, but I have to do it, I can’t stop doing it, and I know myself well enough now to know that it literally keeps me sane. So I keep going, even with a drawing I might not finish, even with a drawing that has no plan, mostly because I could set aside some more “responsible” activities, and it brought me immense pleasure.

Until next week, much love, Lettie Jane

Artist of the Week

Sam Doyle was born March 23rd, 1906.

Doyle and his Gullah community on South Carolina’s St. Helena Island embraced personal choice amid the changing society they lived in, understanding that oppression came in many forms. The title of this piece reflects what is now understood as demeaning slang for an African American, masculine lesbian, but Doyle regarded the sexual inclinations, gender identities, and self-presentations of individuals as part of what made them unique, and his aims were to celebrate individuality. About paintings exploring this theme, Doyle noted: “That’s two in one, a man and a woman, oh yes, a natural.”
(We Are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection, 2022)1

Tidbits

• I finished We Survived The Night by Julian Brave Noisecat. I loved this book. One part memoir, one part Native history lesson, both narratives threaded through with Coyote stories that helped illustrate and deepen the history of Indigenous people in the United States.

• Ann Friedman republished Nikki Darling's poem, "A Street Called Dolores Huerta," (2017) in her newsletter this week. I read it out loud to Matt and we were both moved.

• Megan shared this article with me: Pacific Northwest’s ‘forest gardens’ were deliberately planted by Indigenous people

• Margaret Killjoy In Defense Of Stockpiles

• This was interesting:

  The Artist Economy

  The Death of Spotify: Why Streaming is Minutes Away From Being Obsolete

  The Sentence That Broke My Brain…

  Read more

  2 months ago · 11835 likes · 1157 comments · Joel Gouveia

Classes, etc.

• Deeper Drawing Mini (April 2026)

  Dates: Saturdays, April 4th - April 25th (4 classes)

  Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

• Intro To Colored Pencil Drawing (Sunday AM) May/June

  Dates: Sundays, May 17 - June 7 (4 weeks)

  Time: 10:00am – 1:00pm

• Deeper Drawing Sundays!!!! (MAY/JUNE)

  10% discount if you sign up a month before class starts

  Dates: SUNDAYS, May 17th - June 21st

  Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

• March book club:

  Book Club: Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker
  Date: Monday, March 30th
  Time: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

• LINE TIME is a tiny recorded class whenever you need it.

• Summer courses!

  • Freedom & Mark Making in Illustration at Sitka

    July 11th-14, 10:00am - 4:00pm

    Sitka Center For Arts & Ecology, Otis, OR

Ways to Bring My Work Into Your Home

• Original Artwork - from the calendar and a few of my shows

• Prints & Decks from Buy Olympia

The Bun Update is now behind a paywall, rewarding you kind folks who send money my way.

Read more

Dear friends,

I’m returning from Sou’wester Arts Week, high on the fumes of collaboration and exploration.

I attended as part of LINE TIME, the podcast I co-create with Sanae Yamada, Breesa Culver, and Jason Powers. Calling LINE TIME a podcast doesn’t quite do it justice; on our website, we call it a transitional ritual. I often say it’s a 15-minute invitation to make abstract art.

When we make LINE TIME, I read out drawing prompts like scribble slowly or close your eyes and lay your hands on your drawing surface. Sanae improvises atmospheric ambient music in response to my words. Jason records us live in the living room he shares with Breesa, and Breesa does all the invisible labor that goes into any project: website maintenance, promotion, emails, uploading, brand design, communication, calendaring, etc.

LINE TIME set up shop in the Sou’wester Work Lounge this past week. If you visited us, you walked into a small room filled with art supplies, and a randomly generated audio loop playing prompts like…

Draw the feeling in your lungs

Stretch your fingers

Barely holding the drawing tool, drag it slowly across the page

. . .Sanae’s music pulsed and rippled, lending the experience an almost trance-like quality. There were written directions inviting you to sit down and draw, and to leave your drawing on the walls on your way out.

We have been producing LINE TIME for two years. In that time I have listened to our recordings many times. Sometimes I’m listening critically, to see if anything is off before the episode is public. Sometimes I’m thinking about what is working and what isn’t, and what I can do better next time. Sometimes I’m sharing the podcast with a group of folks and noticing what they seem to like, feel uncomfortable with, and laugh about.

I had a big epiphany this week. Once we installed LINE TIME as an endless art piece on loop in a tiny work lounge, I began to just listen and draw. I got to be a viewer, or a user of our podcast in a way I never had been before. I loved it, the endless loop meant I never wanted to stop. On multiple occasions I spent an hour in the drawing lounge churning out tiny abstract drawing after tiny abstract drawing. I made some very quickly and simply, and others more complex.

As one of its creators, I know I am the most target audience for this experience, but it still surprised me how much I absolutely loved it.

The Sou’wester Arts Week was a weeklong artist residency. I couldn’t fully commit to the whole week, but did my best to get up there as much as possible. I came up for opening night and helped install our work lounge on Monday, then drove back to Portland to take my kiddo to and from school, teach, and finish my taxes. I snuck back to the Sou’wester on Wednesday night with my kid, a 2.5 hour drive, to show him the installation, walk on the beach, and be interviewed by another artist for their project. I left a message on one of the artist-installed phones on the compound, to be turned into audio art later on. Those two interactions were both magical. I directly and immediately started speaking to my heartaches.

I drove back to Portland. I drove out for the third and final time on Friday, to see the ceramics showcase and a few musicians perform. Saturday was the big day that all the artists staying on the compound showed their work, and several of us (LINE TIME included) performed in the evening.

There were over 60 artists staying at the Sou’wester this past week. I listened to the ocean with a hydrophone, walked into the woods to find a block print installation, watched a film with recordings of my memories, shared a meditation with a cult of people following the color fuchsia. I crawled through a scared to sacred portal, read poetry on slips of paper threaded with strawflowers, watched someone caste pewter into sand, and saw lanterns made from the traditional Hawaiian method of beating mulberry bark. I bought a zine with guidance to prepare my loved ones for death, and I bought three wood cut-outs of Snoopy. I saw a couple play an amplified ladder and seem like they were dancing, I saw a dummer who was also a painter, and also an animator, and also a filmmaker, perform. I watched a film about mending a sock that was also a metaphor for mending a relationship. I watched a film from FemmeTV that repeated over and over if I like it, it is good. I saw a comedian who became a cult leader. I listened to a reading about a ballet teacher who died a tragic death.

There was something incredibly expansive about the whole experience. I felt buoyed by artistic connection. I love sharing art with other artists. Mostly, they are curious and excited. Mostly, they want to support each other, because we all understand that making art is hard, and making a living is hard, and doing both sometimes seems impossible.

The world can feel dark, there have been years of genocide. There is a new war that is part of an old war, that feels like a forever war for resources disguised as something more lofty. There are incredibly volatile and chaotic political decisions. I find myself thinking about climate change all the time. Real people are in physical pain and suffering and fear. Close at hand, even critical or antagonistic words from our loved ones can cause physical pain. Somehow, despite all these dark experiences existing on a micro and macro level, a week of art and connection left me light-hearted. I know that art often feels extraneous, and some part of me wants to yell that’s the system of oppression keeping you from joy, but perhaps that’s too big of a perspective.

I just want to tell you all that art lifted my heart this week and gave me reason to believe the future could be creative, adaptive, and magical.

Until next week, much love, Lettie Jane

Artist of the Week

Yayoi Kusuma and Agnes Martin have the same birthday: March 22.

My favorite teacher in art school was Trisha Donnelly. The first day of class she turned off all the lights, told us to be silent, and played the entirety of Prince’s album Purple Rain. She told us this class would be about art she liked, if we weren’t on board, we should leave now. She wore giant gold hoop earrings that said Taurus.

Trisha assigned each of us an artist to research and report on. She picked artists she liked, but that she thought we might like too. She gave me Yayoi Kusama.

It was 2004, and I was 22 years old. At the time I felt a little annoyed, this person just puts dots on things! I was a figurative, illustrative artist who kept taking New Genres classes, and failing to make an installation that actually used the whole room. (Sigh) The conceit of youth! Yayoi is considered one of the world’s most successful living artist, and obviously I’m obsessed with her. Trisha Donnelly was always right.

“Polka dots can’t stay alone. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environments.” - Yayoi Kusama

"Beauty and happiness and life are all the same and they are pervasive, unattached and abstract and they are our only concern. They are immeasurable, completely lacking in substance. They are perfect and sublime. This is the subject matter of art." - Agnes Martin

I loved Olivia Laing’s essay on Agnes Martin in Art In An Emergency. I didn’t know that Martin was gay. I didn’t know that Martin lived as esoterically as her paintings. I didn’t know she quit art and came back to it several times.

"I often paint tranquility. If you stop thinking and rest, then a little happiness comes into your mind. At perfect rest you are comfortable." - Agnes Martin

Classes, etc.

• STARTS THIS SATURDAY

  Intuitive Art Making (Saturday AM) Mar/Apr

  Dates: Saturdays, March 21 – April 25

  Time: 10:00am – 1:00pm

• Deeper Drawing Mini (April 2026)

  Dates: Saturdays, April 4th - April 25th (4 classes)

  Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

• Intro To Colored Pencil Drawing (Sunday AM) May/June

  Dates: Sundays, May 17 - June 7 (4 weeks)

  Time: 10:00am – 1:00pm

• Deeper Drawing Sundays!!!! (MAY/JUNE)

  10% discount if you sign up a month before class starts

  Dates: SUNDAYS, May 17th - June 21st

  Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

• March book club:

  Book Club: Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker
  Date: Monday, March 30th
  Time: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

• LINE TIME is a tiny recorded class whenever you need it.

• Summer courses!

  • Freedom & Mark Making in Illustration at Sitka

    July 11th-14, 10:00am - 4:00pm

    Sitka Center For Arts & Ecology, Otis, OR

Ways to Bring My Work Into Your Home

• Original Artwork - from the calendar and a few of my shows

• Prints & Decks from Buy Olympia

The Bun Update is now behind a paywall, rewarding you kind folks who send money my way.

Read more

This coming weekend (Saturday, March 14th) LINE TIME is performing at the Chinook School in Chinook, WA as part of Sou’wester Arts Week. If you are coming for the weekend, we’d love to have you participate in our drawing performance at 7:00pm. Come say hi that day or email me here.

Dear friends,

I make a lot of different kinds of art across a lot of different mediums. If you are trying to make a living making art, you will continually hear advice about cultivating a style or a brand that your audience can expect from you. It’s great advice, but I have been utterly unable to follow it.

If you read this newsletter regularly, you know I’m deeply in the practice of finding ways to be gentle with myself. I can be very rigid, and have been intensely self-critical in the past. I’m in the practice of turning a once-critical internal-voice into something curious. Why can’t I commit to one medium? with hand-wringing and self-flagellation becomes why can’t I commit to one medium? with gentleness and curiosity.

I give myself permission to explore, permission to be a chameleon, permission to be an abstract painter, an illustrator, and someone who loves to use hand-lettering. I give myself permission to try different mediums or exploring different ideas. This doesn’t always feel like a great move for selling my artwork or my brand, but it does feel like a good move for my soul. It feeds me and keeps me excited.

I’m neither completely an illustrator nor completely a fine artist. I do both. Clients or collectors looking for illustrative work or branding might be worried that they’ll get something abstract. People coming to me for distorted bodies and wild colors might worry they’ll get something that looks like a children’s book. Someone who loves my lettering and just wants a sign might worry they’ll end up with a wonky collage.

I can see my hand in these pieces above, but potentially not everyone does. I see the way I like to blobbify and distort shapes, my penchant for decorating empty spaces with foliage (the same way I sometimes find myself filling in the gaps in conversation, chit-chatting like a magpie).

This patterned collage and figure drawing in ink I did as practice and play. I was curious what would happen. Perhaps I can’t even draw a clear line from them to what I consider my more “finished” work (something that goes into a gallery, or my calendar, or a mural design) but somehow they are in there.

These two animations feel like “me” to me, the one of the left is a watercolor drawing I made where I added movement, the one on the right I drew, frame by frame, in Procreate. I didn’t do these for a client, but for myself, because I got excited by my ability to shift imagery.

On the left is a mural I recently completed for a dear human and on the right a watercolor spread I did in my sketchbook. I can see my hand in both of them, but they are different.

What if you came to my work through this image:

It might be hard to see how the same artist made this:

or this:

Somewhere between those 3 incredibly different images, is the same person. I am trying to find proportions and light on a figure model, design light-hearted but impactful graphics, and experiment with expressive brushwork and color. The connections between these pieces are the way I use my hand: angular motions mixed with wobbly lines, areas of tight control with tips of chaos.

I can throw a few other images between the picture of a somewhat realistic figure in watercolor and a restaurant’s awning with an eye, a mouth, and an ear of corn. The images above show you a figure drawing in charcoal with slightly distorted proportions; a recent page from my sketchbook that includes a human with very distorted proportions and birds around them; a piece from a #100day project with text, and figures in black and white line work; a graphic I drew for the same restaurant (Dove Vivi) for a tee shirt; and then finally, the awning again.

It’s a challenge to balance external expectations on my artwork with my internal process. The only answer I know is to keep turning back to what I need and hope that it resonates with other people. I hope I connect, and I am trying to connect with myself first.

Until next week, much love, Lettie Jane

Artist of the Week

There are some artists whose birthdays we may never know, the internet isn’t even totally sure what year Emily Kam Kngwarray was born, but I’d like to give her a shout out this week. She’s another artist coming from outside the Euro-centric canon, that for me validates all the ways of coming to an art practice. She started painting when she was over 70 years and produced over 3,000 paintings before she died at the age of 85.

With her mix of acrylic painting and abstract Indigenous traditions, Emily Kam Kngwarray revolutionized Australian art and brought new life to Aboriginal art.1

Kngwarray created thousands of works of art that drew from the vast cultural reservoir of knowledge that she channelled as an Anmatyerr matriarch of Alhalker, says Hetti Perkins.2

“My eyesight deteriorated as I got older, and because of that I gave up batik on silk – it was better for me to just paint.” - Emily Kam Kngwarray

‘Dreaming isn’t history or myth,’ [Kelli Cole, a Warumungu and Luritja woman from Central Australia and a curator of the Tate/National Gallery of Australia (NGA) exhibition] said. ‘It’s a living continuation of her presence on Country. Every mark Emily made came from knowledge, ceremony, and interconnection.’3

Classes, etc.

• Intuitive Art Making (Saturday AM) Mar/Apr

  Dates: Saturdays, March 21 – April 25

  Time: 10:00am – 1:00pm

• Deeper Drawing Mini (April 2026)

  10% discount if you sign up a month before class starts

  Dates: Saturdays, April 4th - April 25th (4 classes)

  Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

• Intro To Colored Pencil Drawing (Sunday AM) May/June

  Dates: Sundays, May 17 - June 7 (4 weeks)

  Time: 10:00am – 1:00pm

• Deeper Drawing Sundays!!!! (MAY/JUNE)

  10% discount if you sign up a month before class starts

  Dates: SUNDAYS, May 17th - June 21st

  Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

• March book club:

  Book Club: Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker
  Date: Monday, March 30th
  Time: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

• LINE TIME is a tiny recorded class whenever you need it.

• Summer courses!

  • Freedom & Mark Making in Illustration at Sitka

    July 11th-14, 10:00am - 4:00pm

    Sitka Center For Arts & Ecology, Otis, OR

Ways to Bring My Work Into Your Home

• Original Artwork - from the calendar and a few of my shows

• Prints & Decks from Buy Olympia

I’ve struggled to know what to do about “paid content” for this newsletter. Some of you incredible humans subscribe and send me money, I’ve wondered how to reward you, while still making the content accessible. Here it is, I’m putting YE OLDE Bun Update behind a paywall, if you want bun content, subscribe.

(Thanks Breesa for the newsletter consulting)

Read more

This week I’m sending you just a handful of drawings I recently made, with not too many words. May the pictures be worth the words this week.

Sometimes I can just allow myself to let go.

But what about all of my responsibilities? What about my work? My kid? My partner?

I can make mistakes and be forgiven. I can move through the world.

Until next week, much love, Lettie Jane

Artist of the Week

Hollis Sigler was born March 2nd, 1948, and died March 29th, 2001 from breast cancer. She was openly gay in the 1970s. This sentence on her Wikipedia page caught my eye: She had early success with a series of photo realist paintings that depicted underwater swimmers, but by 1976, in a gesture meant to repudiate what she considered a male-dominated style, she abandoned realism entirely in favor of a faux-naïve approach.

“The only permanence is change. We must remain forever hopeful. We can't give up.” - Hollis Sigler

Tidbits

• I love this song, I love this video:

YouTube served me this video as a follow-up:

Which I had not even realized was visually referenced in Doechii’s version until now.

Classes, etc.

• Friday Night Figure Drawing - MANY MODELS! (one time class)
  Dates: Friday, February 27th
  Time: 5:30 pm – 8:30 am

• Deeper Drawing Mini (April 2026)

  10% discount if you sign up a month before class starts

  Dates: Saturdays, April 4th -April 25th (4 classes)

  Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

• Intuitive Art Making (Saturday AM) Mar/Apr

  Dates: Saturdays, March 21 – April 25

  Time: 10:00am – 1:00pm

• March book club:

  Book Club: Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker
  Date: Monday, March 30th
  Time: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

• LINE TIME is a tiny recorded class whenever you need it.

Ways to Bring My Work Into Your Home

• Original Artwork - from the calendar and a few of my shows

• Prints & Decks from Buy Olympia

Bun Update

Jiji is perfection, and always very grumpy.

Hello, my friends,

When the phrase “learn the rules to break the rules” comes up in any art setting a small part of me dies inside. I hate that phrase. I’m not here to tell you what to do, but I am here to dig a little deeper for myself into why that is.

I am neurodivergent. Many of you may also be at some intersection of learning difference. Those of us who learn differently may have spent hours as a child agonizing over things that came naturally to others, only to find out those rules DIDN’T ACTUALLY MATTER.

In my case, I could not spell to save my life. I would spend hours at home trying, I would cry and throw tantrums. I didn’t like writing because of spelling, and I didn’t play scrabble because of spelling. I never could have imagined I would write a weekly newsletter, because I’m dyslexic and I still can’t spell some words. I have learned how to spell words like tomorrow from sheer repetition, but the fact that I may never remember how to spell unconscious no longer matters at all. I just clicked that word, corrected the spelling digitally, and moved on with my life. Repetition (had to type that word twice to spell it right) and practice has helped, but technology has also changed since I learned to spell. Spell check is my bestie, in text messages, emails, and this newsletter, it makes it possible for me to communicate with you. You don’t get caught up on my spelling, and second guess my ideas or what I’m writing because I don’t know how to spell repetition. Technology has evolved, my spelling is no longer a hurdle for my communication. It’s still harder for me to spell than a neurotypical person, but I have a seat at the table, and I think my perspective is valuable.1

Traditionally, drawing fundamentals were taught and adhered to because artists and craftsfolk were trying to depict reality. If you were making a portrait, it really mattered that you were able to measure the distance between the nose and the mouth accurately, because this was the only way someone would obtain a picture of themselves. Over time, the need to make a realistic drawing was replaced by easier and easier access to photography. I can take a realistic, and even emotionally compelling, photograph in a matter of moments. Drawing realistically can be soothing, a form of mindfulness, but we don’t need it in order to capture the world around us. Along with this shift the art world changed radically.

The effect photography has had on art making is Art History 101, it’s given us Modern Art, from Impressionism to Installation Art. And yet, I still find myself bumping up against the need to draw realistically. I still hear people say “you need to learn the rules to break the rules” in art classes all the time. Why? I ask internally, and which rules do you mean? Divide the frame in thirds? Why do I need to learn the rules? What if the rules are like spelling? I agonize, cry and throw my paper at the wall, and then when I can show that I know the rules by making something realistic, I realize IT DOESN’T ACTUALLY MATTER.

This figure drawing I did in watercolor is realistic, the proportions are believable, but the toes area mere suggestion, the back of the thigh isn’t even articulated. The face, which looks generally like a face, is actually a few brush marks. I’m validated, I’ve got the basics of a the human form, I can draw something recognizable.

Still, I feel some internal conflict, why do I have to prove that I can draw realistically? Why has the goal been set to realism again? As a teacher, I know that the best part of me wants to model failure, that messy or unrealistic drawings happen, and there is nothing dire about that, just an opportunity for learning what you like. Simultaneously, I feel the need to prove that you should listen to me, and I do that by proving that I can capture reality in a drawing. I am slowly, gradually making my way away from that default setting. I want to let people know that they don’t have to draw realistically before they draw expressively. It feels like I am swimming upstream, against a whole world of “you have to learn the rules to break the rules” culture.

The drawing above feels like one the most successful figure drawings I’ve ever made. It’s in conversation with the art work I make for myself: human figures straining against the boundaries of the page. This drawing shows the way I use charcoal, in soft values and angular marks, but the figure is stretched to the edges of page, hands, hips, and shoulders exaggerated.

You can see this in my other work, human forms navigating the edges of the paper, squished but still recognizable. I’m avoiding realism altogether.

When I hear or see drawing guides to drawing fundamentals, a piece of me knows that these can be tools to help someone start out, to find a few shortcuts to seeing what’s really there. Still, my body clenches, hating the idea that something could be “bad” or “wrong” in a piece of art. I don’t want any of my students to feel that way.2

There is value in knowing the eyes are in the middle of the head, it’s a shortcut that will make your drawing more realistic, but how many people’s faces are even symmetrical? Not many. These kind of fundamentals can help you capture something realistically, but somewhere in these diagrams around the proportion I feel discomfort. We are not all proportional, I think, and whose proportions are we talking about any way? Something in this kind of feels fundamentally Euro-centric and patriarchal. The deeper question is why?

Perhaps I should back out a little and let you (if you are an artist, drawer, figure drawer) check in with your goals around this practice. Would you like to be able to draw or paint a human being realistically? Why? Are you illustrating a graphic novel or comic book? Wonderful, I have no freaking idea how you all do it, and I applaud you.

Are you making a portrait for your friend, and she needs to be seen in her best light? Fantastic. Let’s stay accurate, proportional, and make sure those eyes are symmetrical!

Are you making your figurative work to explore something more psychological, emotive, evocative? (I know that I have a preference here and it’s showing). Well, realism might hold you back rather than help you.

Three paintings by figurative painters who I LOVE: Chantal Joffe, Alice Neel, and Jennifer Parker. If I come up against the idea that a figure drawing must be proportional or realistic in my own work, I can look at these artists and think I don’t even gravitate to that in others’ work. Did these artists learn the rules to break the rules? Maybe they learned to draw exquisitely rendered and realistic bodies. Maybe they sat down with da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and studied proportion, and spent countless hours recreating reality before they went rogue. That could be wonderful, but what if measuring proportions made them feel like I felt trying to spell: stupid, not enough, afraid to write my thoughts down because everyone would know I couldn’t get the rules. Would they have continued to paint? Did they just have enough punk attitude to know these rules don’t matter and move on with their life?

When it comes to “learning the rules so you can break the rules” there is one artist that I hear about more than any other: Picasso. But have you seen his early drawings? is the backdrop to many conversations about his work. I’ve heard people say things like he could actually draw. While I love and appreciate so much of Picasso’s work, I can no longer write his name without thinking about Hannah Gadsbury’s eviscerating review of him in her Netflix comedy special, Nanette.

Gadsbury walks us through Picasso’s misogyny and never lets him off the hook. Perhaps we should always look at Cubism and be reminded of Picasso saying “Every time I change wives I should burn the last one. That way I’d be rid of them. They wouldn’t be around to complicate my existence. Maybe, that would bring back my youth, too. You kill the woman and you wipe out the past she represents.” Perhaps I’m not so interested in the rules that guy is breaking anymore.

What is the purpose of these rules? I frequently say to my students “art isn’t open heart surgery, your mistakes won’t kill anyone.” You could argue that learning drawing fundamentals is a way for artists to gain more skills, more ways of seeing, new creative sparks. I’d agree with you, but I’d stop short of saying that you have to learn drawing fundamentals before you begin exploring art more expressively. It feels like gatekeeping.

“You have to learn the rules to break the rules” could apply to the history or context of your practice, which is definitely valuable. When I hear the phrase, and I get some hit of “you need to draw realistically before you start making things up” is when I feel sick inside. How many people never draw because they’ve somehow taken this in? It fills me with rage, for myself, struggling to validate my urge to make art and still feeling like I need to prove that I am deserving of it by drawing something accurately. I’m filled with rage for all the perspectives and voices we’ve already lost. People who haven’t shared their images with us, or cultivated their inner worlds through art, because they couldn’t make a human look human-enough on the page.

I’ve tried to articulate why the phrase “you have to learn the rules to break the rules” triggers me. I learn differently, I’ve battled against artistic gate-keeping to prioritize making my art, I don’t think anyone needs to learn to draw realistically in order to express themselves. I even think prioritizing realistic drawing over expressive drawing is deeply intertwined in a euro-centric and patriarchal perspective. This all being said, there is no wrong way to make art. All the power to all the magical, beautiful artists who paint realistically.

I’m just here to interrogate my responses to the world, and once again to come back to the same place: make your art no matter what, make it for yourself, for your friends, for your clients. Keep making your art when it’s bad, when it makes you angry, and keep asking yourself why.

Until next week, much love, Lettie Jane

Artist of the Week

Frank Bowling was born on the 26th of February in Guyana in 1934. He moved to London in 1953 and is now recognized as one of the greatest abstract painters living in Britain. He was knighted in 2020 and still paints every day at the age of 91 (92 tomorrow).

“The arguments for an African legacy are often over-stressed and at time aggressively asserted. However there’s no denying its emotional and political significance. It is clear that modernism came into being with the contribution provided by European artists’ discovery of and involvement with African works, and their development of an esthetic and a mythic subject from it.” - Frank Bowling on Why It’s Not Enough to Say ‘Black Is Beautiful,’ in 1971

Tidbits

• Loved this short video about artists Ruby Sky Stiler & Daniel Gordon being new parents and artists: https://www.alexandergray.com/video/43/ I had the biggest crush/art crush on Ruby in art school, her last undergraduate year was my first, and I have continued to keep tabs on her amazing work in the 25 years since then.

• I read Funny Weather: Art In An Emergency by Olivia Laing. I found this book incredibly inspiring, I would have read it much, much more slowly if I wasn’t trying to finish it for my book group. Each essay was worth it’s own little meditation. Laing’s language is poetic and visual. I felt like I lived with Georgia O’Keefe, and sat with Arthur Russell on a ferry. Laing reminded me again and again that you can talk about heartbreak while still celebrating joy.

• This week I wondered what a baby hummingbird looked like and was delighted to find out they look like this:

  

Classes, etc.

• Friday Night Figure Drawing - MANY MODELS! (one time class)
  Dates: Friday, February 27th
  Time: 5:30 pm – 8:30 am

• Deeper Drawing Mini (April 2026)

  10% discount if you sign up a month before class starts

  Dates: Saturdays, April 4th -April 25th (4 classes)

  Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

• Intuitive Art Making (Saturday AM) Mar/Apr

  Dates: Saturdays, March 21 – April 25

  Time: 10:00am – 1:00pm

• March book club:

  Book Club: Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker
  Date: Monday, March 30th
  Time: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

• LINE TIME is a tiny recorded class whenever you need it.

Ways to Bring My Work Into Your Home

• Original Artwork - from the calendar and a few of my shows

• Prints & Decks from Buy Olympia

Bun Update

Have you ever been obsessively in love with someone who would prefer you weren’t around? Well then, rabbits are for you. Jiji spends a very large portion of her days in here, her castle, avoiding humans and sleeping. She will deign to be petted at dusk and dawn when treats are provided. She is not here for us, we are here for her.

Hello, my friends,

This week I’d love to talk about my practice of adding words to images.

I like titling my artwork. I love looking at what I made and trying to attach words that describe and expand the meaning. I love thinking of words like doorways—openings that help a viewer access the image in a new way. Rather than reducing an image to something you can just read and move on from, I want language to add another layer to the artwork.

I’ve done several daily drawing projects with the intention of putting words to images. The drawing above is from my 2017 project centered around offering words of advice to myself. When I look back through these drawings, so many of the messages still resonate and/or mark the transitions I was going through at that time.

The drawing above is from my 2020 daily drawing project, which was simply: words with images.

I usually start these kinds of drawings without a plan. I might just start moving my pen in a way that feels soothing, drawing something that feels reflexive: a plant, a face, strands of hair. I add some elements for texture, and others because they pop into my head. I’m making sense of the picture as I go. I think of this as working intuitively because I’m trusting my impulses.

Adding text shifts the meaning.

I am selecting the language using reflex and intuition. I’m looking for that little spark of understanding, a phrase that doesn’t make sense of the image so much as it makes sense of how I am feeling.

Some titles, like All Scrolling Is Doom Scrolling, are phrases that have been echoing around in my head and suddenly feel like they fit something. This image felt like a human who was weeping, but also strong, inspired, and grounded. Someone who knows how addictive scrolling can be and reminds themself to get off the damn app. Someone paying attention to their one precious life.

Sometimes I mine the scattered notes of my sketchbook, looking for words I wrote months or years ago, trying to articulate something back then that’s still coming to fruition now.

I’m often trying to articulate something nuanced, so some titles take a long time to settle. The shaped panel painting above felt like a gathering, perhaps the three figures were self-portraits: the me that wants to hide, the me that wants to give, and the me that stands up and tries to take control of a situation. Somewhere between those three figures was my relationship to socializing and social anxiety. The figure who takes control of the situation delegated: I’ll Bring The Rice And You Bring The Salad, and suddenly the painting felt like attending a potluck. The title brought some levity to the social anxiety. This piece would feel very different to me if I called it My Three Stages Of Social Anxiety instead.

I’m having a hard time titling the above artwork. I look at it and think it’s about feeling suffocated, but also protected. I think it’s about being squished, but letting that membrane be a space for growth. I think it’s about feeling like my body is a blob and my mind is sharp, with tiny little boots. There’s some echo here of blue and white Chinese pottery, some historical context I was channeling but didn’t acknowledge until now. I look at my sketchbook and wonder if the title is Collectively Unhinged? I look at an old journal and wonder if it’s Because We Try To Communicate. I wait for the full body “yes,” and think it could be either. Or something else.

I’ll leave you with an invitation to open up your own artwork with words, find the circuitous path, mine the image, your own journals, and notice the full body “yes.”

Until next week, much love, Lettie Jane

Artist of the Week

Obviously Yoko Ono is an Aquarius, she’s an outsider, a freak, a genius. Her birthday is February 18, 1933.

“I was being hated for about 40 or 50 years by the whole world, but it did not destroy me, and it did not ruin my health. And the reason is because I just did not answer them. I had my own life.” - Yoko Ono

“Experiencing sadness and anger can make you feel more creative, and by being creative, you can get beyond your pain or negativity.” - Yoko Ono

Tidbits

I’ve been neglecting to tell y’all about some of the tidbits I’ve been imbibing, so this section is a little longer than usual.

• I read Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. The writer is Polish, the novel takes place on the Czech border, and feels like it could potentially be magical realism. It’s written from the perspective of an old woman who loves animals and astrology. I loved listening to the audiobook and rooting for this strange protagonist.

• I read Art Work by Sally Mann and Art & Fear by Ted Orland and David Bayles. I loved Sally Mann’s book—I loved her strong voice and the way she threaded her personal life into her insights around making art. The momentum of the book lagged a little in the middle, but please finish it because the last chapter is a zinger. Mann writes about Ted Orland A LOT in her book, they were great friends and had a letter-writing correspondence which he held on to and then returned to her. I approached Art & Fear with excitement, wanting to hear Orland’s side of the story. Expectations are often the bane of enjoyment, and in this case, that was true, I missed the personal anecdotes in Art & Fear. It felt a little more impersonal and imperious. If there was anything I got from it, it was to keep going, no matter what.

• Matt I watched Hamnet and The Testament of Ann Lee. They take place in a similar time frame and are both visually stunning. I don’t know what was going on with me at the time, but I was almost too taken with the settings and costumes to emotionally relate to the characters, so unlike some of you, I didn’t leave the theater sobbing.

• We had THE BEST TIME going to see Hairspray at the Tomorrow Theater, with drag host Violet Hex walking us through Hairspray-related BINGO. BINGO clues included things like “falsies” and “Tracey lets Amber have it.”

• I watched Spirited Away on the big screen at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. It felt like seeing the movie for the first time. I could see the magnificent brushwork in the backgrounds, details I’d never noticed when watching it on a home screen.

• I know I’ve already mentioned Heated Rivalry, but it bears repeating. It brings me so much joy. I’ve watched the show four times and read the book Heated Rivalry in two sittings.

• If you just started loving Bad Bunny because of his epic Super Bowl halftime show, can I re-recommend listening to DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, it is so so beautiful.

Classes, etc.

• Intuitive Ink Work (Saturday AM) Feb/Mar

  Instructor: Lettie Jane Rennekamp

  Dates: Saturdays, February 21 - March 7 (3 days)

  Time: 10:00am – 1:00pm

• Deeper Drawing (Feb/Mar 2026)

  Dates: Saturdays, February 21st – March 28th

  Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

• First book club was magical, next couple are on the website.

  Book Club: Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing
  Date: Monday, February 23rd
  Time: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

• LINE TIME is a tiny recorded class whenever you need it.

Ways to Bring My Work Into Your Home

• Original Artwork - from the calendar and a few of my shows

• Prints & Decks from Buy Olympia

Bun Update

We call this “one ear-ing.” It’s a great illustration of what wonderful, telescopic devices these rabbit ears are. Trouble has some of my favorite ears, because of the shape and the way they typically splay out like a peace sign.

Hello, my friends,

I need to make you aware of two classes I’m offering this Saturday. It’sValentine’s Day and I want to celebrate love, not expectations about having a partner, or having your partner do a certain thing, but simply love.

The first class I’m teaching runs 10:00 am-1:00 pm. It is a Tarot On Valentine’s Day class. We’ll go over some basic tarot knowledge. I plan to distribute worksheets with information about the suits, numbers, court cards, and Major Arcana. The true purpose of this class is to connect with each other through pulling cards and, more importantly, connect with ourselves. I will weave in a little grounding, a little channel opening, and a sense of humor. Bring your sweetheart, come single, come with your bestie. Take the “Valentine’s Day” part or leave it.

• If you’ve never had a tarot reading and want to see what it’s all about, this class is for you.

• If you’ve been pulling cards for your friends for a while and want to try your skills with a room full of new folks, this class is for you.

• If you want to hear more about my journey with the tarot, or my deck, Many Queens Tarot, this class is for you.

• Sign up here.

My second class, Collaborative Watercolor, runs from 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm. This is an exercise I use in my Intuitive Art Making class that brings me so much joy. It is a beautiful way to learn about watercolor, and also an experiment in collaborating. Each person in the class paints on every single painting; this means that no painting is “yours” and all the work is “ours.” The results are consistently spectacular because having multiple approaches to brushwork and color mixing is visually rich and compelling. Students have described joy in letting go of the results and learned new ways to approach their own work. This is a beautiful class to do with a friend or on your own. Sign up here.

I am promoting these classes, not only because it’s what I do for a living, but because I truly believe in the healing power of gathering like this. Making art and getting together in a classroom opens us up. I’ve had conversations about a recently deceased parent, a break-up, a job change, and a full-blown existential crisis while teaching these classes. Those topics might sound scary, or keep some of you away, but I have to tell you how good it feels to let down the cognitive dissonance and tell someone how you really feel.

Speaking of telling you how I really feel. Last week I wrote to you about letting your heart break. For me, those words come from a place I’ve been working around for years. I think of it as the come to your edge and soften place. Those words were once said to me in a yoga class, but I’ve applied them to my life over and over again. Really upset with my kid? come to your edge and soften. Don’t think you can watch another horror in the news? come to your edge and soften. Hate this piece of artwork you are making? come to your edge and soften.

This softening, or what I called tenderness last week, feels like an important element to letting your heart break. However, this past week I felt like I was perhaps too presumptuous in inviting you all to let your hearts break. Here I was, bathed in birthday attention, seeing my dear friends for a spa day, eating Mexican food with my family, having my siblings and parents shower me with old photos and a massage (it was a good birthday week), and I’m telling you to let your heart break? You can’t break without planning for some repair. The repair I’ve come to rely on is my friends and community. I tend to have deep conversations, but cast my net wide (Gemini Moon problems?)

When my heart aches, I have the rabbits, the kids, and my partner as a first line of defense. After them, I reach out to friends. I watch Heated Rivalry, and I take a bath. I get into my bed early and read. I eat popcorn with butter. Breaking your heart in the world is like breaking your heart anywhere; it needs mending and support.

This week, I’d love for you to find support, whether through friends, popcorn, watching Bad Bunny’s halftime show, or taking a class with me.

Until next week, much love, Lettie Jane

Artist of the Week

Joan Mitchell was born tomorrow, February 12th, 1925.

"Abstract is not a style. I simply want to make a surface work. This is just a use of space and form: it’s an ambivalence of forms and space." - Joan Mitchell

Tidbits

• I still have calendars! It’s February and if you still don’t have one, don’t worry, I’ve got them! INTERWOVEN 2026

Classes, etc.

• Listen to LINE TIME at home, make an abstract drawing, and chill out.

• Sign up for Feb/Mar classes:

  • Collaborative Watercolor

    Date: Saturday, February 14th
    Time: 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm

  • Tarot On Valentine’s Day

    Date: Saturday, February 14th
    Time: 10:00 am – 1:00 pm

  • Deeper Drawing (Feb/Mar 2026)

    Dates: Saturdays, February 21st – March 28th

    Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

  

  • Intuitive Ink Work (Saturday AM) Feb/Mar

    Instructor: Lettie Jane Rennekamp

    Dates: Saturdays, February 21 - March 7 (3 days)

    Time: 10:00am – 1:00pm

  • First book club was magical, next couple are on the website.

    Book Club: Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing - only $5.00

    Facilitator: Lettie Jane Rennekamp
    Date: Monday, February 23rd
    Time: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

Ways to Bring My Work Into Your Home

• Original Artwork - from the calendar and a few of my shows

• Prints & Decks from Buy Olympia

Bun Update

Throw back to a day when me and this ridiculous beast were both showing off our crinkly old faces to the camera. Trouble remains soft, a little evil, and ridiculously cute.

My friends,

It’s my birthday week. I turned 44 years old on February 3rd.

I am wiser. I love getting older for this reason alone. The wisdom is less about accumulated information and more about knowing myself better. I have to keep listening to myself, and then (this is the kicker) accepting what I hear. Too tired? Well, it’s time for rest, but also maybe I shouldn’t take on so much next time. I know I am wiser because I trust myself more, and it’s still a work in progress, but it feels different than it did even a few years ago.

This past Saturday, I had my Intuitive Art class create abstract drawings. I invited them to play, but in the play I offered the opportunity to feel. I asked them to make brush marks about their fears, lines that acknowledge the sadness, and touch the materials with tenderness or anger. I knew that I needed the space to be honest with myself about how I was feeling, and I wanted to offer that to my students as well.

Sometimes when I hear or see something horrific, I think I just can’t right now. And while that may be true, there is also value in gently, kindly, and with great care, acknowledging what is going on. There is value in slowing way down, rubbing a paint brush against a page, and knowing that under all the scheduling, emailing, and task-managing, there might be pain.

I am trying to let my heart break. Tenderly, and with great care. I am letting myself look at the horrors. I can watch the videos of people being shot in Minneapolis, or the devastating wreckage in Palestine, or the folks living in tents on my street, and let my heart break just a little. I don’t want to be desensitized to this. I don’t want to hurry away from this dehumanization. I feel like I can’t handle it, but I can. I don’t have to fix it, not yet. The first step is to acknowledge it. The next step is to sit with it. I’m doing this not so I can fall on the floor in a helpless puddle, but so I can move forward with intention.

I used to feel like letting my heart break would leave me heartless. I am still terrified of heartbreak, but the older I’ve gotten, the more I understand when I can open my heart to the world. I know when I have capacity and how much to let in. I have a better understanding of how and when I can share my heartbreak. Sharing the pain, talking about it, or pushing a paintbrush makes it bearable. I think that letting my heart break, and be healed, and break again, actually expands my capacity for love.

I’m older, and I’m holding the heartbreak of the world, to the degree I can hold it. I am slowly getting comfortable with not fixing everything. I am trying to talk about it. I am stretching my capacity for discomfort. I am practicing listening to my friends and my students, to my children, and my partner. In feeling this heartbreak, somehow, I feel more attuned to joy. I feel more eager to hug someone or tell someone I love them. I feel more, and it allows me to feel more.

This is my birthday week, and I invite you to let your heart break as much as you have capacity for, and then, perhaps, to let it expand.

Until next week, much love, Lettie Jane

Artist of the Week

Nick Cave was born today, February 4th, 1959.

“Nick Cave creates “Soundsuits”—surreally majestic objects blending fashion and sculpture—that originated as metaphorical suits of armor in response to the Rodney King beatings and have evolved into vehicles for empowerment. Fully concealing the body, the “Soundsuits” serve as an alien second skin that obscures race, gender, and class, allowing viewers to look without bias towards the wearer’s identity. Cave regularly performs in the sculptures himself, dancing either before the public or for the camera, activating their full potential as costume, musical instrument, and living icon.” (Art 21)

“The role of protest: in order to be heard, you have to SPEAK LOUDER. “ -Nick Cave

Tidbits

• I still have calendars! It’s almost the end of January and if you still don’t have one, don’t worry, I’ve got them! INTERWOVEN 2026

  

Classes, etc.

• Listen to LINE TIME at home, make an abstract drawing, and chill out.

• Sign up for Feb/Mar classes:

  • Collaborative Watercolor

    Date: Saturday, February 14th
    Time: 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm

  • Tarot On Valentine’s Day

    Date: Saturday, February 14th
    Time: 10:00 am – 1:00 pm

  • Deeper Drawing (Feb/Mar 2026)

    Dates: Saturdays, February 21st – March 28th

    Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

  • First book club was magical, next couple are on the website.

    Book Club: Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing - only $5.00

    Facilitator: Lettie Jane Rennekamp
    Date: Monday, February 23rd
    Time: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

Ways to Bring My Work Into Your Home

• Original Artwork - from the calendar and a few of my shows

• Prints & Decks from Buy Olympia

Bun Update

Trouble would like you to know that he sees you and all the hard work you are doing in the world. Keep up the good work.

Hello friends,

This past week, I have been seeing some incredible internet content about the resistance movement in Minneapolis, interspersed with Heated Rivalry memes. I’ve been hearing from folks about their fear, outrage, and activism. I’m trying to name the soup many of us are swimming in. The more endless-scroll information I take in, the more pressure I feel to add my own hot take or deep insight. I need to CATCH UP, to get current. When I watch comedians, or influencers articulate things so well, I remind myself, that is not my lane.

Instead of offering a tepid take, I’m inviting you to my art show.

Yes, in the face of fascism, I’m writing you a weekly newsletter and reminding you that this Friday I’m having a party from 5-8pm at 2324 SE Belmont Street. Please come visit. Why? Because I want to see your face, and talk about what you might be doing, thinking, feeling.

(Things people told me this week: protesting at the Portland ICE facility, keeping ICE watch at a school, this guide to talking to your kids about ICE. Also things people told me this week: they attended a knitting camp where they stayed on a working farm, celebrated their 40th birthday on short notice with friends in wigs, they went bouldering on a sunny day in Oregon).

I think our country is toppling in a terrifying direction, and not despite but because of that, I want to see you, and talk about my art. I want you to tell me how my paintings make you feel. I want to try to articulate how I am feeling.

These paintings are made with a combination of acrylic mediums, grit, and sand. They were made in response to my friend Rin’s incredible ceramic sculptures, and I was trying to capture some of their visceral texture. They sculpt tiny figures during live figure drawing sessions and glaze them with wild embellishments. Their work is emotive and playful.

I started by copying their color palette, primary colors, beige speckled clay, and black. However, I found I could barely use yellow, I kept substituting gold.

I was deeply pulled by blue: cobalt, ultramarine, phthalo blue— rich, and a little melancholy.

When I started working, I was incredibly intimidated. I have a deep reverence for Rin’s work, and started my process by simply trying to copy it, making paintings of their sculptures.

This approach made my drawings feel stunted, and yearning. It wasn’t until Rin’s sculptures left my studio that I was able to work from impression instead of replication.

My impressions from Rin’s work are figures that are embodied, playful, and a little squished. Squished meaning physically shaped by hands and slightly abstracted, but also the physical feeling of being squished, melted, molded, forced, or funneled into life. My body feels squished, my mind feels squished.

After my paintings were finished Rin made another series of sculptures, based on my artwork, that are now displayed interacting with my pieces. They combine 2D and 3D elements alongside emotional levity and sadness.

Come by this Friday and see these textured paintings in person. Let’s chat about Heated Rivalry, your dog or your phone call to a senator. Take care.

Until next week, much love, Lettie Jane

Artist of the Week

Mickalene Thomas (b.1971) and Alice Neel (b.1900) share a birthday today, January 28th.

"I would describe my art as radically shifting notions of beauty by claiming space... my art gives Black women their flowers and lets them know that they are the leading role." - Mickalene Thomas

“Whether I’m painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I’m not working, I’m still analyzing people.” - Alice Neel

Tidbits

• I still have calendars! It’s almost the end of January and if you still don’t have one, don’t worry, I’ve got them! INTERWOVEN 2026

  

Classes, etc.

• Listen to LINE TIME at home, make an abstract drawing, and chill out.

• Sign up for Feb/Mar classes:

  • Collaborative Watercolor

    Date: Saturday, February 14th
    Time: 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm

  • Tarot On Valentine’s Day

    Date: Saturday, February 14th
    Time: 10:00 am – 1:00 pm

  • Deeper Drawing (Feb/Mar 2026)

    Dates: Saturdays, February 21st – March 28th

    Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

  • First book club was magical, next couple are on the website.

    Book Club: Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing - only $5.00

    Facilitator: Lettie Jane Rennekamp
    Date: Monday, February 23rd
    Time: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

Ways to Bring My Work Into Your Home

• Original Artwork - from the calendar and a few of my shows

• Prints & Decks from Buy Olympia

Bun Update

Is it a rabbit or a Bûche de Noël? I’m not sure, but in either case I would like to eat it.

Hello friends,

As your respectful artist friend, I have no words for the world at large, but I do have words for my experience of it.

I am one small set of hands, eyes, and ears here on earth, and I feel most fulfilled when I make art. I can hear myself think, and I notice how I feel. When I feel nervous, anxious, scared, it’s in my throat (a little tightening), my upper back (heat), and around my jaw and temples.

These are the sensations, and the narrative comes after, once I acknowledge them.

I might be tapping into the collective fear (the curse and strength of being a sensitive person), but I have also been working on some larger jobs that feel incredibly intimidating to me. I feel like I am on the edge of a cliff where I’m about to be perceived by so many new people on the other side, and it scares me.

I recently told a dear friend that I am always trying to be perceived, by which I mean I am trying to be understood. Explaining myself is why I make art and write this newsletter. However, I can’t help but want to control those perceptions. I want to be perceived and understood, but only if people accept me.

I am absolutely terrified of leveling up, of success, of too many people seeing me. At the heart of this, I am terrified of any criticism at all, even a tiny little bit. I can make a mistake and feel a hot thrill up my spine and have to repeat to myself it’s okay to make a mistake. I worry that this person will be mad, or that person, or this person will leave me, or I will be shunned. When I am perceived and accepted, I am eased. But what if I am perceived and rejected?

I know this feeling comes for all of us at one time or another, but particularly if we have felt like we were a freak in the past. Maybe you come from a marginalized identity, learning style, or income level. Maybe, it’s not easily explained, just a cumulative, absolute terror that the entire village will leave you stranded alone to defend for yourself.

I’m not sure I can identify exactly when I realized I was different, or why, but I know it was early. I’ve tried to cover up, mask, pass, and learned how to navigate the world. I’ve had to find people who I could be real and vulnerable with. I’ve had to let go of trying to be something for other people (always a work in progress). I’ve found a lot of healing through connection.

I had a student last year, nearly a decade younger than me, who said to me I don’t have time to not be vulnerable.

I am creating a mural that will be installed at the Portland Airport. It will be eleven feet tall, and sixty feet long. They told me they estimate that 20,000 people will walk past it per day. I’m making the image here in my studio, and they are blowing it up and installing it with a vinyl wall covering. I have been thrilled, proud, and terrified through this process. I applied assuming that I wouldn’t get the job, I got through the second selection process, certain that I wouldn’t get the job. I got the job, I’ve created the artwork, and I am in the process of adjusting the design. I’m grateful, but terrified.

Until next week, much love, Lettie Jane

Artist of the Week

My personal goal for this section of the newsletter was to highlight an artist or two who were born in this week. I was waffling between Cindy Sherman (born January 19th, 1954) and Barbra Kruger (born Jan 26th, 1945). However, I have been so struck by Iiu Susiraja’s work that I felt called to share it now, despite her birthday being September 15, 1975.

“Being fat is a transgression in itself, I try to be empty and boring, but the camera is more cunning than me.”

There is something deadpan, funny, and inevitably disturbing about the confrontational “empty” gaze that Susiraja delivers. I found myself returning to Zoo over and over again, I couldn’t stop looking.

Cindy Sherman is a pioneer of photographing herself, costumed, disfigured, and in such an intense conversation with the viewer’s gaze, that it feels meta. Iiu Susiraja is a descendant of that conversation.

Tidbits

• Crumpled and Comforted - come see sculptures by Rin Noelle and paintings by me. Closing party: Friday, January 30th, 5:00-8:00 pm.

  

• I watched Heated Rivalry TWICE. The first time I was on the edge of my seat wondering if the two hot hockey players would get caught and be shunned (like the fear I wrote of in this newsletter). The second time I was able to enjoy the beauty of these humans and slowly believe in love.

• I loved reading Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle. It was funny and entertaining. I felt immersed in a world. It captured this time period when a black middle class was building in New York, through a protagonist who I rooted for from the beginning.

Classes, etc.

• Listen to LINE TIME at home, make an abstract drawing, and chill out.

• Sign up for Feb/Mar classes:

  • Collaborative Watercolor

    Date: Saturday, February 14th
    Time: 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm

  • Tarot On Valentine’s Day

    Date: Saturday, February 14th
    Time: 10:00 am – 1:00 pm

  • Deeper Drawing (Feb/Mar 2026)

    Dates: Saturdays, February 21st – March 28th

    Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

  • Omg, what’s this? An art book club with Lettie Jane? Yes, yes it is.

    Book Club: ArtWork by Author Sally Mann - only $5.00

    Facilitator: Lettie Jane Rennekamp
    Date: Monday, January 26
    Time: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

Ways to Bring My Work Into Your Home

• Original Artwork - from the calendar and a few of my shows

• Prints & Decks from Buy Olympia

Bun Update

January 17th is our Ma’am-a-versary, meaning we’ve had this incredible little tidbit for three years. She was, unfortunately, not feeling well on this day. I waited on pins and needles, wondering if I should take her to an emergency vet (rabbits have incredibly sensitive digestive systems, and we’ve lost two bunnies to stomach issues already). A little after midnight she went to the bathroom and accepted a treat, signs that everything was normal again. The superstitious part of me wondered if she was marking her own transition. The practical part of me was just relieved that she was okay, and glad that I wasn’t at the vet in the middle of a Saturday night.

She is the most perfect rabbit. Everyone’s favorite because of her dignity and adorable-ness. There is no perfection in art, but there is perfection in rabbits, and Jiji is it.

Hello friends,

This week I found myself trying zoom out to make sense of what’s going on in the world. I thought, what everyone stopped fighting and just got together to address climate change? but there is no “just” anything. I want to make a fell swoop to solve everything, like in Pluribus when the hive mind takes over and everyone begins working together (except of course, we lose the ability to create, and all the other compelling issues that come up in that show).

This TED Talk came my way, and it names all the things leading ultimately to societal collapse, it attempts to end on a light note (because it’s a TED Talk, right?) but it felt hollow. Where do we land when one thing follows another in breaking our hearts? I kept going on with my day. I talked to my friend on the phone, made some art, and ate brunch with a friend— societal collapse? It’s hard to swallow, it’s hard to sit with.

Do we “look for the helpers” like Mr. Rogers told us to? Join them, participate in mutual aid? Do we write our representatives? Do we repost, bitch to our friends, and make up something to tell our kids?

I have no idea. I’d say artist’s choice if I was teaching, but I’m not, and I’m not qualified to teach living.

What I do have is another video to share:

There is something about witnessing the Māori haka in New Zealand Parliament that brings me to tears. I don’t know if it gives me faith, but it brings me hope. There is this juxtaposition between a very formal room, and this explosion of expression and unity from an Indigenous people. Something about seeing the Māori, who have experienced loss and marginalization, stand in power and unity, I just weep.

I was reminded of this video because Matt and I watched Uproar (on Hulu) this week. It’s a touching film about one Māori teenager’s experience of the riots that broke out in New Zealand in 1981 when South Africa’s rugby team visited the country. I will try not to spoil anything, but I will say there is a haka, and I cried.

My newsletter this week is short, I’ve got a busy week, but I wanted to send you something that both acknowledges how much devastation there is, and something that signals hope. Maybe an invitation to follow the light, keep orienting towards positive movement, and keep making change, whatever lane you are in.

Until next week, much love, Lettie Jane

Artist of the Week

Kiki Smith (born January 18, 1954) is a German-born American artist whose work has addressed the themes of sex, birth and regeneration. Her figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s confronted subjects such as AIDS, feminism, and gender, while recent works have depicted the human condition in relationship to nature.1

Kiki Smith – “Artists are always trying to reveal themselves and remain hidden at the same time.”

I love Smith’s sensitive and emotive work, it feels like one of those dreams you wake up from and think oh that’s one of the meaningful ones.

Tidbits

• Crumpled and Comforted - come see sculptures by Rin Noelle and paintings by me. Closing party: Friday, January 30th, 5:00-8:00 pm.

  

• If you have the heart for it, I’ve also recently felt moved by John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s video for Happy Xmas (War Is Over). It was made in 1992, and it shows clips of people living through war, some joy, so much heartbreak. I wanted to watch it just to see how some artists have navigated cruelty in the past. Is it an oversimplification? What else can we do but hope, spell cast, and keep going?

Classes, etc.

• Listen to LINE TIME at home, make an abstract drawing, and chill out.

• Sign up for Feb/Mar classes:

  • Collaborative Watercolor

    Date: Saturday, February 14th
    Time: 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm

  • Tarot On Valentine’s Day

    Date: Saturday, February 14th
    Time: 10:00 am – 1:00 pm

  • Deeper Drawing (Jan/Feb 2026)

    Dates: Saturdays, February 21st – March 28th

    Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

  • Omg, what’s this? An art book club with Lettie Jane? Yes, yes it is.

    Book Club: ArtWork by Author Sally Mann - only $5.00

    Facilitator: Lettie Jane Rennekamp
    Date: Monday, January 26
    Time: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

Ways to Bring My Work Into Your Home

• Original Artwork - from the calendar and a few of my shows

• Prints & Decks from Buy Olympia

Bun Update

Do you need a blanket slowly shredded over time? Would you like your containers or towel to have a chic “distressed” look? Trouble can help. Send us anything that looks too new and he can add some rabbit tooth-shaped holes.

Hello friends,

When I say “this year I will be selfish,” how does that make you feel?

It gives me a strange mix of guilt, intimidation, and excitement. I already feel guilty for the people I may hurt by thinking about myself first.

But what about putting on your own oxygen mask first, and you have to take care of yourself to be able to take care of others?

Am I even capable of identifying what I want? Can I trust myself to know when something feels good? Perhaps hearing me say “this year I will be selfish,” makes you feel calmer, knowing you don’t need to take care of me, because I will be taking care of myself. You don’t need to anticipate my needs because I will be doing that.

My word for 2026 is INTERWOVEN, meaning I am interwoven with the people around me, including my community, family, and the media I consume. The word INTERWOVEN also evokes something more abstract than the word “community.” INTERWOVEN, to me, involves a level of magic, encompassing ancestor work, the dreamworld, and the communities of animals, spirits, and plants I interact with. I want to pay attention deeply, to the magic and the invisible feelings. I want to cultivate more self-trust and self-confidence.

I am working with a few concrete and tangible goals for this year, as well as some big-picture thinking shifts.

Concrete goals:

• No sugar / no fried food January (don’t judge myself or others in doing this)

• Weekly walk in nature

• Put everything in the calendar

• Write my physical to-do list every day (in my work journal??? try that and see if it works)

• Keep up with my physical work journal

• Be more organized with my notebooks (keep only one sketchbook and one work journal in my bag at a time)

Intangible goals:

• Notice when I feel good / comfortable, and follow that

• Believe in myself / cultivate self-confidence (what do I actually think about using the word “power”?)

• Let there be more silence / listening / patience

• “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.” - Prentis Hemphill

This newsletter will land in your inbox on January 7th. You may or may not already be into your version of New Year’s Resolutions, In/Out lists, or Dry January. Perhaps this kind of intention setting does not serve you. I send you my intention setting not to outdo anyone, or as a performance, but for accountability and self-reflection. In a year of being selfish, I am aware that you are reading this, but that I am writing this for myself.

Thank you for being my witness, and for witnessing yourself, wherever you are.

Until next week, much love, Lettie Jane

Artist of the Week

For a while, I’ve been considering adding a section of this newsletter about other artists. As the new year turns, I’d like to start. I was inspired to share artists whose birthdays fall during my newsletter week.

Two artists whose birthday is TODAY, January 7th:

• Robert Longo - “Art is an attempt to try and understand our own contemporary situation through making images that are completely personal, while also addressing our social context.”

• Sabrina Gschwandtner

Both of these artists have practices that reckon with human history and material craft. I have never seen either of these artist’s work in person, and I think I am missing out on an immersive experience.

Robert Longo creates gigantic, hyperrealistic charcoal drawings, often a commentary on capitalism and colonialism. The work is meticulous and complex in concept and execution.

Sabrina Gschwandtner creates meticulous woven patterns with film, lit from within/behind the artwork glows in a dimly lit room. Gschwandtner’s work is a commentary on and celebration of handwork, women’s labor, and the intersections between the two.

Tidbits

• Put it on your calendar, I’ve got an art show in January with the incredible Rin Noelle. Closing party: Friday, January 30th, 5:00-8:00 pm.

  

Classes, etc.

• Listen to LINE TIME at home, make an abstract drawing, and chill out.

• Sign up for Feb/Mar classes:

  • Deeper Drawing FEB/MAR

    Dates: Saturdays, February 21st – March 28th

    Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

  • Omg, what’s this? An art book club with Lettie Jane? Yes, yes it is.

    Book Club: ArtWork by Author Sally Mann - only $5.00

    Facilitator: Lettie Jane Rennekamp
    Dates: Monday, January 26
    Time: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

Ways to Bring My Work Into Your Home

• Original Artwork - from the calendar and a few of my shows

• Prints & Decks from Buy Olympia

Bun Update

The caption could be: Jiji is curious about my reading glasses or Jiji is upset about objects left in her domaine. Both are true. The Queen can really get rilled up when we fold laundry on the floor, sit on her couch, or play with LEGO in her preferred pathways.

My dear friends,

I want to write a newsletter that makes meaning of the past year and sets intentions for the next. I feel a little listless, unmoored even, unable to take on this task with my usual zeal. Recently, I’ve been thinking that it’s not just me; everyone seems to be suffering from more than ennui. There is a general decline in executive function.1

Just in the past two weeks, I forgot a few appointments (what happened to checking your Google calendar every day, Lettie Jane?); I didn’t respond to a few emails until things were circled back (or I was the person circling back); and I lost my phone and my wallet multiple times for unusually long periods of time (1 day, the wallet; 20 minutes of looking for the phone).

There are distractions on top of distractions; if it isn’t an app on my phone that profits from my attention, it’s a store that’s been designed very specifically to get me to buy more things. If it’s not an email inbox suddenly full of new “deals” after my Christmas online shopping spree, it’s the 5 streaming services I manage through trading passwords with my family, giving me more entertainment options than I have hours in the day. Managing my own attention and executive functioning feels like driving through a rainstorm of bird shit. The windshield wipers keep flapping, and somehow I’m supposed to get to work on time.

Acknowledging this bird shitstorm we’re all driving in feels like a good backdrop to articulating what my last year was, and what I want to orient towards next year.

Lo and behold, one of those new distractions (Substack’s algorithm) feeds me this post: How to Reflect on Your Year in 60-90 Minutes. I go down that rabbit hole for an hour and come back here, full of photos and notes, halfway to making sense of things for myself, but wondering what to share with you, dear reader. How do I weave a proper year-long reflection into one consumable piece of writing for a world whose attention span is interrupted every 12 minutes and 40 seconds?2

I looked up the New Year’s Resolutions I wrote last January in a newsletter titled Spitballing, and here’s what I followed through with:

• doctor’s appointments

• be rich in socks / buy plenty of socks / buy any pair of socks I want (I have so many socks now!)

NYR that I did not do:

• little weights for lifting while watching tv

• buying less / keeping a list of what I want to buy and sitting on it before I do

• creating a different promotional email, just about classes and shows

Things I sort of did:

• working on my retirement account (I did start a retirement account, but I do not feel very knowledgeable about this subject still)

• moving more of my organizational materials to Notion

• attending Hoyt’s monthly mending days

• working on children’s book illustrations

Things I can’t really measure but were on my NYR last year:

• using less packaging

• cooking more

• honing my craft (in italics because it’s a very vague and lofty goal)

I notice that rather than feel shame around what I didn’t do, I think I guess that wasn’t that important. I still think lifting small weights while watching tv is a good idea, maybe I’ll do that this year.

Aside from NYR, my word for last year was STRENGTH. I thought I might cultivate a feeling of self-confidence, coming out of the year stronger. Instead I found myself tested, and evaluating what made me feel valuable and why.

I thought I was in place where I had confidence in my art practice, but this year made me really evaluate where that confidence came from. In 2024, I had sold out art shows and made large chunks of money selling my tarot and oracle decks to a mass market publisher. In 2025, I participated in THREE solo art shows (at Radius, the Southwest Community Center, and The Fresh Pot) but sold the work in a slow trickle. I had multiple jobs that started and stalled out. I painted the wrong mural in someone’s home. I realized that some of my confidence and happiness in 2024 was attached to financial abundance. The most direct way to validate my art practice is money: even if I don’t believe I’m making art for that reason, it’s there. I am still fairly new to the practice of being a freelance artist, and riding the inevitable ebb and flow of resources is terrifying.

I had enough money, and I had to try wrench my value away from income. I still feel engaged in my art practice, and was proud of the work I made last year. The title of my show at the Southwest Community Center, What Goes Up Must Come Down, comes from a giant woodblock print that shows rain and seeds, and a small human figure, tucked under a plant. I was referring to the growth cycle, but it’s truly a metaphor for my lifelong struggle with high highs and low lows. I’ve become more balanced through years of therapy, not drinking, making art, and meditation, but still believe that when I’m happy I need to hold on to that happiness. Sadness is just around the corner, and could take over at any moment! Strength is not being happy all the time, strength is knowing that I have capacity to feel sadness, that it will not wreck me. I have tools to come back from hard feelings.

Why I chose to measure strength in what makes me valuable, I’m not sure. I do know that I am still a beginner at thinking I am enough just as I am— does anyone think that? I do know that I value myself based on what I can do: generate income from art, write a weekly newsletter, teach people to like their art practice, get my kids to school on time, clean the house. I want to be “good” as a parent, a citizen, and a business owner. I wonder if being “good” is being accepted. I wonder if being “good” means being able to survive under capitalism. What does “good” have to do with strength? My idealist mind answers: you can get knocked down and get back up again.

I prioritized going to the doctor this year because of increasing lethargy and brain fog. I had to get reading glasses for the first time in my life. I have gained 40 pounds in the past 4 years and am increasingly unmotivated to sustain an exercise routine. I found out that I have pre-diabetes and high cholesterol. In all honesty, although I’ve increased walking after meals, I haven’t done much to combat these diagnoses. I got my first blood work done in January, and the second in October, and not much changed. I’ve dismantled a lot of body shame over the past decade, but found that a lot of my healthy eating and exercise was motivated by wanting to be thin, more than healthy. I’ve cultivated a love of fat bodies. I love tummies, thighs, and softness. Sometimes I love my own, but often I wish I could forget my body and just exist without having to maintain it. I mostly try to ignore values placed on physical beauty, but am seriously grappling with the changes age and weight are putting on me.

I’ve quit drinking, and in its place, I often use food to combat fatigue, stress, or pain. My favorite “meal” is popcorn with real butter. I don’t want the kids to feel shame around food, but in my low moments, I freak out about ramen and packaged everything. Where is the balance between healthy eating, exercise, and self love? Can I motivate myself to a 6:00 am jog if I don’t care about being thin? I ask myself these questions and give you my January NYR: no sugar January. I think I can, I think I can.

I am trying to address my pre-diabetes and high cholesterol through another avenue: stress.

I am in a committed relationship with my partner, Matt, who has three kids from two previous relationships. I have one kid. All four children have other coparents, with whom they spend roughly half or most of their time. Sometimes I try explaining our custody arrangements to people in casual conversation and watch their eyes glaze over. Matt’s teenage daughter spends more time with her friends and less with us. All three boys, ages 11, 11, and 12, go to different schools, where I sometimes try to keep up with back-to-school nights, homework, and their friends’ names. If Matt and I had the most harmonious and supportive relationship in the world, and the kids never had problems, it would be a lot to keep up with. My stress is my responsibility, and yet it’s felt inescapable in these circumstances.

When things fall apart (as they inevitably do), they FALL APART. After living together for 4 years and 1 month, I moved out. We are still in a committed relationship, but with two houses and more physical (and emotional) space. This decision was agonizing, and I only made it with the support of friends and therapists. How does anyone know when they are actually at their wits end? How do you know when to change, cope, or create an exit? For me, it was seeing myself through my friends’ eyes, and hearing that (despite loving my partner and the family we’ve patched together) this was actually too hard for me.

Matt is a wildly creative, funny, sweet, kind human with his own issues. He plays the accordion when I’m mad, makes me coffee and tea in bed, and rubs my feet frequently. We enjoy traveling together, doing crosswords, and are both music nerds. We’re both a little woo. We try to find common ground in tv shows, but I love emotional drama, and Matt loves musicals. Maybe we’d be perfect without kids, maybe we’re perfect because of the kids. Realistically, the only perfection is in rabbits, and relationships are hard.

I moved out in October, it was a drastic move to address some of the problems that had existed from the beginning but worsened over time. Navigating household labor in a hetero relationship is challenging, add to that the fact that Matt has ADHD and 3 children, and multiply the stressors accordingly. I told my therapist that this relationship came to me to teach me boundaries, boundaries I didn’t even know I had. What boundaries do I have for what I spend my time doing? How much control I could have over other people? (like duh, none). I think I should be ferrying children to school and having family dinner, but if I’m honest with myself and you, I’d rather be drawing.

We don’t know how this will go, but having one night all to myself a week for the past two months has been transformative. I feel like I can hear myself think. And although I’ve done a ton of thinking while driving this past year, thinking while alone in your own house, with your own dishes, and your own power bill, just hits different.

So far, I’ve told you the ways my year has been challenging, but that’s not the whole story. My year has also been so full of community and art, and for that I am grateful. I’m a self-employed artist who runs a successful art studio with two other incredible artists. Although I can say my confidence was tested when I painted the wrong mural or didn’t sell all my work, I understand it’s a privileged place to be. Selling any artwork is a gift, and running a business doing it requires a wild and ever changing combination of luck, privilege, and work.

Here is a bulleted list of events I’d like to celebrate from 2025:

• I traded portrait painting sessions with Tyler Bingham.

• I ran a figure modeling class with 3 amazing friends and a cohort of artist/models who now feel like good friends.

• I did a one day encaustic workshop with Andrea Benson.

• I recorded another year of episodes of Line Time, and one live episode! I am in awe of the magic of this project and the genius of my 3 collaborators.

• I painted Leach Garden’s Children’s cottage, a true dream project, painting imagery to engage kids in a beautiful garden. One morning I came upon a deer, many evenings I saw bunnies, and once someone set up singing bells and played while I painted.

• I took two kid-free trips with Matt. We road-tripped over Spring Break to the Bay Area and Fresno, CA (where he grew up and his folks live), and we went to a friend’s wedding in Las Vegas.

• I got to paint a lazerwolf mural with gold paint for the unofficial mayors of Portland, Leah Benson & Gram.

• I got to collaborate with my friend Daren for his 34th birthday show, and on a mural in Tigard that we’d designed the year before.

• I saw my friend Holly get married!!!

• The Listening Oracle was released!!!!

• I got to visit Lisa in Brookings twice.

• I got to visit Ameen twice.

• We took all the boys to Kentucky, all 3 of them rode a horse at a trot and drove a tractor.

• I went camping with my best mom friends, watched a band play in a creek, and slept in a tent down river (or was it up river?) from Breitenbush.

• I went to freaking Hawaii with Cole, Jolyn, and Allie.

• I participated in another LP show.

• I taught at Creative Arts at Menucha and found new community. I taught at Sitka and played with ink.

• I curated two shows in the Crying Room at Ulna, and almost cried both times.

• I painted a mural at the Moda Center and they put me on the jumbotron.

• I texted Hoyt and Megan so many bumper stickers.

• I played cards monthly with Aubree, Ryan, and Leah.

• I shared book recommendations with Ana, Tanya, and Sabrina.

• I continued to host a monthly artist business club.

• I texted my Best Moms pictures of the children being cute and chaotic. We made cheese and cracker dinner a regularly occurring event, sometimes with a hot tub.

• I climbed through an ancient rhododendron and painted a mural for Julie.

• I did a Creative Mornings talk about growth, meaning rot, decay, and new ideas, you can watch it here: https://creativemornings.com/talks/lettie-jane-rennekamp

I am lucky to have a wonderful community: old friends, incredible artists, students, teachers, biological and chosen family.

My word for last year was strength, and maybe the only way you find strength is by testing yourself. I am still writing a weekly email, although I’ve made mistakes, and am not perfect. I’m still navigating friendships and family, although I’m living in an apartment with just my son and me. I am still making art, whether I sell it or not.

I want to make up a phrase: I want to say I chumbawumba-ed the year, meaning I got knocked down, but I got back up again.

Sending you each love, whether you got knocked all the way down, still aren’t back up, or floated through the year feeling just fine. I appreciate you, and hope to see you in 2026.

Until next week, much love, Lettie Jane

Tidbits

• Put it on your calendar, I’ve got an art show in January with the incredible Rin Noelle. Closing party: Friday, January 30th, 5:00-8:00 pm.

  

• One year of playlists on Spotify, all in one 16 hour, 7 minute selection:

• Almost all the books I read: Books I Read 2025, although I’d still love to go through the list and pick out my favorites.

Classes, etc.

• Listen to LINE TIME at home, make an abstract drawing and chill out.

• Classes start this coming Saturday & Sunday:

  • Deeper Drawing (Jan/Feb 2026)

    Dates: Saturdays, January 3rd – February 7th
    Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm

  • Intuitive Art Making (Jan/Feb 2026)
    Dates: Saturdays, January 3rd – February 7th
    Time: 10:00am – 1:00pm

  • Intro To Figure Modeling (Sunday PM, Jan/Feb 2026)

    Learn to model! Draw many different models over the course of 6 weeks!

    Instructors: Dolan Dolan-Wolfe, Hoyt, Alyssa Hursh, and Lettie Jane Rennekamp
    Dates: Sundays, January 4th – February 15th, NO CLASS 1/18 (MLK weekend)
    Time: 5:30 - 8:30 pm

Ways to Bring My Work Into Your Home

• Original Artwork - from the calendar and a few of my shows

• Prints & Decks from Buy Olympia

Bun Update

Jiji, with one of her perfect poops, in her castle that sort of looks like it has disco lights.

Beloved friends,

It’s the eve of a holiday that—whether you celebrate or not—probably effects you.

This year on the longest night of the year, my dear friend Hoyt invited me to not use electricity once the sun set. From 4:30 pm on December 20th to 7:30 am on December 21st, I didn’t turn on a light or a screen. I read and wrote by candlelight. I didn’t have the kids, or my partner, or my friends over. It felt like a 15 hour portal to another world.

I realized I could do this anytime, whenever I wanted, with children or without, alone or in company. I could turn off the lights and just slow down.

I have invitation for you, and me for this holiday, to find and cultivate moments of peace and rest wherever you can. Turn off what you need to, and turn in when you need to.

Of course, this is easier said than done, but something to aspire to, and to honor as a basic need.

Next week I’ll be back with more words, probably too many words, and an end of year reflection.

Much love, Lettie Jane