“…the part of me that knows how to make art is once again vital.” - Anne Truitt

The partial quote that I use as the title for this post is from the American sculptor Anne Truitt’s memoir, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist. This is the first book in her series of four memoirs written and published as a diaristic account of her days. 

I read all four last winter, my first in Fairbanks, the coldest city in the United States. I found reading her books had the same intimacy as reading letters from a fellow artist friend. Each is brilliantly written with intriguing historical and literary references, and vocabulary. 

I started reading Daybook just before Thanksgiving.  It came in the mail a few weeks after I fell down a flight of stairs. I was volunteering at the Fiber Festival held inside one of the buildings in Pioneer Park here in Fairbanks. I slipped on a piece of unspun wool just as I started descending the stairs from the third floor to the second. It must have dropped from one fiber artist’s box or another. 

It was a hard fall. I landed on one knee, only bruised, and my left hand. I broke the knuckle of my thumb, my metacarpiphalangeal joint or MCP.  Yes, I’m left-handed.

No one wants to fall and break a bone. A left-handed watercolor painter would be quite unhappy to break their thumb. I was. It was also painful and made my teaching days feel a bit longer. I didn’t paint the first month following my fall as I had a brace on my hand. Instead, I read Truitt’s books. 

I found overlapping threads in the quilt of each of our lives. She referenced the classics, spoke of artists coming over to her studio or attending a gallery opening of one of her shows. She wrote much about her on-going efforts to find balance between art and motherhood, the cost of creating large pieces of sculpture and paying the mortgage, and her long stays at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. I haven't stayed there myself, but a dear friend has and spoke much to me about it. 

I attempted to make a new painting the last week of November. I did the pencil sketch. It looked fine. Then I started painting it. I got half way through and stopped. The soft sweep of watercolors was absent. In its place was layers of paint applied in an effort to hide errors. The slender lines I drew of tree branches were not matched by the paint I pulled my brush across them. Instead of a single branch, it looked like two. 

I had posted pictures of its progress on my social media accounts believing my hand had healed enough to return to my painting abilities before falling. It hadn’t. I sat at my art table one evening, looked at the work and then tore it into thirds. This work didn’t represent me. I was acting too quickly. I finally accepted that it would be months until I would be physically able to paint again. 

Two months passed before I started a new work. I began Puzzle on January 28th, 2024. I finished it almost a month later on February 22. That is the longest time it has ever taken me to complete a painting. Yet, this was a windowpane painting, a format new to me.

I literally dreamed of the painting after coming home from school one day. I walked through my front door so utterly exhausted that I fell asleep with my coat on in my bed. I dreamed of painting an array, which was part of the math test I had given and corrected earlier that day in my 3rd grade classroom. 

I named my newly finished painting Puzzle for its many panes. Too, it was a puzzle for me to learn how to draw and paint in this format. Note: In the photo below, the text was digitally added to the image and is not part of the painting.

I successfully painted another work after Puzzle titled,  Luck. It is not a windowpane painting. It’s a classic format piece of one artwork centered on an 11x14 piece of watercolor paper. Its size remains a gained gift of my injury. I have moved from 8x10 works to 11x14, and they will continue to grow to museum size. My thumb favors the larger size. Too, once I could paint again, I wanted to expand my portfolio of work. I started by working on my mental list of envisioned projects. Moving to a larger sized work was at the top of the list.

Also, this unexpected gap between the painting I finished before breaking my thumb and successfully beginning another, gifted me the time to read the insights and practices of other artists. I started to carefully look at my earlier work and ask, “Is the work what I had envisioned?” and “What should I add or take-away?” This rolled over to looking at Puzzle, which I do favor,  but much of the seaweed in it was born from my paintbrush. I found I wanted scientifically correct sea algae instead of ones my paintbrush and I created.

I started going to UAF’s library and studying sea botany. While there I sketched out elements I wanted to include in my next artwork. 

At home, late in the evening one night last week, I completed the sketch of my new piece. It's a windowpane artwork. The drawing is of herring and rockfish swimming amongst a variety of seaweed. The mouths of the rockfish with take on unique characteristics as I paint each. 

Last night, I began painting the sketch. That first bit of color is always such a satisfying moment, and then the next. The blackish seaweed is casually called Deadman’s Fingers. All the seaweed in this painting are actually found in bodies of water.

I will paint everything in each pane but the fish and ribbons of algae. Those are the last elements to finish. 

When all is painted and dried, I will remove the tape. I will then lower the first plate of glass over it. Next, I will position the dried seaweed I gathered and pressed when I was in Cordova the last week of June on top of it. Another plate of glass will then be placed on top and fitted into a frame. 

The photos below are of me using some of the pressed seaweed as a creative pre-trail with Puzzle. 

I truly favor how it looks. A double plated, wooden frame with backing is being custom made to house the multi-layered work.

Soon I will began sketching the other two paintings to complete my first triptych. My hand has healed. Although, my left thumb now has a permanent and noticeable right angle when it’s at rest; healed but changed by the breakage. The two months pause in painting brought a new complexity and depth to my work via the advancement of and deeper commitment to my craftsmanship: studying, reflecting, sketching, acting on my ideas.

Eventually, my artistic goal is that each pane of such formatted works will be a complete painting in itself. Years ago, when I was on a return trip to Paris, I watched as a French woman read to her grandson each panel of a stained glass piece in Notre Dame Cathedral. She noted me looking and said, “These panes of glass are pages in a story we read.” Decades later, her words are guiding me on what I want in my art. 

When Anne Truitt writes about her hand not performing as per usual in the creation of her artwork, she is speaking about the debilitating impact of losing the impulse to create due to strain, which included the emotional and financial weight that hovered over her for decades. Her hand won’t make. Different, yes, from my physically broken hand but the results were the same, neither of us could create works of art.  Now, as noted in one of her quotes below, “My hand is back in.”

On page 11, under the sub-heading 8 June, she writes:

"My hand is out. I feel it a numb weight hanging off my arm as if no longer quick with life. The marks on my fine-grained drawing paper are simply marks, physical traces as chicken tracks in the dirt.”

On page 23, under the sub-heading 2 July, she writes: 

"My hand is back in. The tourniquet that strain had been twisting around it for the past few months has loosened, and its connection with the part of me that knows how to make work in art is once again."

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