Dear Stacey (12 Feb ‘26)
Dear Stacey,
I’m all over the place today which seems to be the way when I land back in the studio after a long hiatus. My mind is like an overfilled cup spilling out everywhere (which is a parenting metaphor we use with the neurodivergent contingent of my family). I need to breathe but I feel completely frantic.
The art market seems quiet or I am just soo out of the loop that I can’t see the wood for the trees!!??? I have an exhibition coming up soon at FLG and I am soo anxious that no one will come and none of the work will sell. It’s been the hardest time for sales and I know you are feeling too. It’s hard to know what to do… ride it out, lower prices, make a bunch of cheap prints to sell, get a job in a shop or office?! I honestly don’t know how I could fit another job in with three kids, stewarding the land and animals, the garden… It’s been a stressful summer navigating Total Fire Ban days (which means kids are doing school online from home) and fire weather warnings! Yesterday a grass fire the other side of Subury ripped through kilometres of farmland. It escalated quickly. A while not that close to us, it is within my “watch zone” and puts us all on edge.
One of my accomplishments this last month is getting W to help build the fence around the kitchen garden! It is 90% finished and I can’t wait to kangaroo proof it completely and plant more flowers. Having cut flowers is essential for my work it seems. I grow and tend the plants, cut the flowers and arrange them in the house and studio and they become the subject of paintings, drawings and they bring joy. We built a fence based on one that one of my neighbours has. It’s essentially two rows of star pickets and dead tree saplings thinned out from our bush (don’t worry there is more than enough left) laid out like a weaving between the rows. It feels like another form of my art practice… land art! It’s so darling and i love to wander the rows of veggies and flowers inside the confines. We finally got rain last night and the ground thirstily drank it up. What a relief!
The garden is quite depleted before the rain yesterday and so the bouquet I have to work from in the studio at the moment is very muted washed out greys, ochres, chartruese and cream. It is rather beautiful really, but i do crave those deeper rain soaked colours you get in Autumn… not long now!
I am enjoying the oil sticks you got me onto. They are like working with a buttery lipstick on smooth paper and they dry! Wonderful!
I guess I need to block out the world and draw, paint and just get on with the creative practice. I need to stop worrying and hope that the world will turn its attention back to fine arts and crafts eventually. People buy so much crap form the big box stores, its so depressing and the things break and then where do they end up!? I know you know. What ever happened to considered purchases, lay-byed clothes and art?! The collapse of Art Money was such a blow for the Australian art world. I love being able to pay off an art work (when I could afford to do so). It is hard when costs are rising and i get that and hard to remain bouyant when there is so much tumult in the world…
I just finished a few books. One for book club, A Gentleman in Moscow but Amor Towles. I have many thoughts. In brief it annoyed me greatly. Then I backed it up with Banana Yoshimoto’s The Premonition which was written in 2015 but hasn’t been on my radar. I loved Yoshimoto’s books in my 20’s and then forgot about her. It wasn’t as good as Goodbye Tsugumi and Kitchen. And I listened to Love Objects by Emily Maguire which i found intensely upsetting and triggering and also took away some lovely ideas about the importance of objects, memory and family. Conversations for another day though because i need to stop procrastinating and get on with some paintings now.
Big love, Lizzie
