Welcome to my monthly newsletter! (It’s still March for a few more hours….I made it in time!) Scroll down to stay updated with the art and events happening in my world. Be encouraged and inspired to live wholeheartedly and creatively in your own life!
Hello friends!
After an historic snowstorm and bitter cold blanketed our already disrupted lives last month, we weren’t sure if our sleeping trees and frozen flower bulbs would come back to life. But spring has sprung here in the Hill Country of South Texas, y’all! New life! Happy spring!
The following is a quick note to remind you that…
You were born creative.
When my boys were little they were almost always dirty. Like, with dirt. We lived in the Central Valley of California and the generally sunny weather accommodated my little barefooted ragamuffins spending most of their time outside. The yard felt like a continuation of the house, doors always open. It was a fluid indoor/outdoor situation.
One summer my husband decided to build a sandbox out back. It was deep, had a graceful wooden frame, a built-in rim to sit on, and a hinged trellis lid to keep neighborhood cats at bay. With a truckload delivery of clean, dry play sand, his handiwork was complete and the boys entered into Little Boy Heaven on Earth!
Two weeks later, that handsome sandbox had been converted into a full-blown DIRT-BOX, which the kids discovered was even more amusing when hose-water was applied liberally. My grownup sensibilities protested the muddy transformation, but to the boys it was a most exciting improvement. They devoted hours and hours to sculpting that mud into “cities” and “farms” and “Rescue Hero bases”, with “rivers” and “lakes” and “seas” sprawling throughout. These were not meticulously fashioned sand castles, they were mounds of mucky mud. But to my little boys it was a magical, otherly-world all of their making.
Knowing better than to come into the house mud-caked, they would periodically strip down to their Cookie Monster-spangled chones and invite me to appreciate their handiwork. ”Mommy! Come see!” they’d call from the sliding glass door. Their tiny faces flush under dirty drips beamed with blooming satisfaction as they described the ongoing saga playing out in their inner worlds and in mucky mud.
It wasn’t hard to marvel with them. Every mother delights to see her children enthralled with their own creations. Sacrificing the knees of my bluejeans, I’d kneel in the sludge to catch a glimpse from their vantage point. But, really, my understanding wasn’t the point of the exercise. Muddy metropolis building was meaningful simply because it gave voice to the inner worlds of three little boys. They were practicing their desire and agency to create. I did not teach them to create, it was an in-born trait. I only served as a witness.
You and I are like my little boys - creative to the core, made in the image of The Great Creator from the start, and ever-invited into co-creation.
Don’t forget to stand back and witness the beauty that will inevitably come as you live wholeheartedly from that core.
-Sarah
Commission a painting!
After a rush of commissions earlier in the year, my humble little studio has been pretty quiet this month. She’s rested and ready for more work! ;) Let me know if there’s a painting you’d like for me to create for you! Do you have an idea, a mission, a message you’d like to display through images on your walls? I'd love to have a conversation and work to create for you a just-right painting.
Springtime paintings.…
(Archival paper and canvas prints are always available on Etsy.)
Dreaming, acrylic on wood
This is one of my favorites. There’s something about the movement and color that rings my heart.
Fun fact: Not long after I finished creating the original, we found ourselves shlepping her from Fresno to Visalia, CA in our pickup truck. Somewhere along The 99, the 4 x 4 ft canvas flew from the truck bed, whirling into the air to dance her final but impressive exhibition, then splintered into a million pieces all over the freeway.
Oh well. Prints are available.
On Houses, original 4 x 6 ft oil and gold leaf on wood, $500; prints also available
“But you, children of space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed.
Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast.
It shall not be a glistening film that covers a wound, but an eyelid that guards the eye.
You shall not fold your wings that you may pass through doors, nor bend your heads that they strike not against a ceiling, nor fear to breathe lest walls should crack and fall down.
You shall not dwell in tombs made by the dead for the living.
And though of magnificence and splendour, your house shall not hold your secret nor shelter your longing.
For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.”
-On Houses, Gibran, The Prophet
Send the Light, ink and pencil on hymnal sheet
“Let us not grow weary in the work of love.
Send the light! Send the light!”