The shape of a month

One thing I've realised over the last year is that I have a terrible memory for my own creative life.

I can get to the end of a month feeling as though I've barely done anything. I'll look around the studio and see the paintings I didn't finish, the ideas I didn't get around to exploring, and the sketchbook pages that still feel unresolved. My brain has a habit of looking at all of that and deciding the month wasn't particularly productive. Then I sit down to write The Painted Post.

Every month I think the letter will be fairly straightforward. I'll write a little about the print, mention what I've been up to, print it out, pop it in the envelope, and get on with the rest of my weekend, but it never really works out like that.

Somewhere in the writing, I start remembering things I'd completely forgotten about. The afternoon I spent filling pages in my sketchbook. The book that I'd been thinking about for weeks afterwards. The conversation that sent me down a completely different path. The walk where I stopped for far too many reference photos. The painting that didn't work, but taught me something anyway.

By the time I've finished the letter, I'm usually looking back at a completely different month from the one I thought I'd had.

I've realised they've become something I never intended them to be. I'd always thought of them as something that accompanied the artwork, but they're more a record of everything that happened around it. They're full of the things that never make it onto an email or a social post, but are somehow just as important to the finished paintings.

They're where I've written about months where I barely painted at all, and others where one sketch seemed to unlock everything that came afterwards. They've captured hikes that kept finding their way back into the studio months later, commissions that changed how I thought about painting, afternoons spent learning completely new mediums, books that shifted my thinking, and ordinary moments that somehow became the thing I wanted to paint most. At the time they just felt like things that had happened that month. Reading them back now, they've shown me patterns I never would have spotted while I was busy living them.

I think, for a long time, I assumed my practice only really counted when I was standing at the easel. Everything else felt like the bit before the work started. These letters have slowly chipped away at that idea because they've reminded me that the work begins much earlier than that. It begins while I'm reading, walking, sketching, filling my camera roll with reference photos I'll ignore for six months, sitting with an idea that isn't quite ready yet, or noticing something ordinary that quietly refuses to leave me alone.

None of those things feel especially significant while they're happening, and most of them don't even feel like making art. They're simply parts of life that stay with me a little longer than everything else. Looking back now though, it's obvious that they're the things feeding the work all along. The finished painting is simply where all of those quieter moments eventually meet.

I don't think I appreciated any of this when I started The Painted Post. I thought I was creating a monthly subscription centred around a print, but what I accidentally created was a reason to stop every few weeks and properly take stock of what had been happening in the studio and, more importantly, outside of it as well. Without that pause, I suspect I'd still be reaching the end of every month convinced I'd achieved very little, simply because I'd forgotten all the quieter parts that never seemed important enough to remember.

I still catch myself doing it now. I'll think it's been a slow month, sit down to write the next letter, and realise there was much more happening than I'd given myself credit for. The paintings tell part of the story, but the letters have become the place where I remember everything else.