July Love Letter: Getting through the learning curve
It is officially summer! I hope you are staying cool wherever you are. This will be our first summer in Texas, and so far it hasn’t been too bad. I will take the Texas heat over Georgia humidity any day.
This past month has consisted of lots of driving, water, and movies. Dan and I took a short trip to Panama City Beach, FL, which ended up being a 14-hour drive one way. I’m impressed by our ability to drive that long in one day, but we both agree that it isn’t the most fun thing in the world to do. I love the beach and wanted to make this month’s sticker sheet inspired by our trip.
The two prints this month consist of something old and something new. The light pastel painting is one of my most recent paintings, Sure As Spring, titled after the song by La Luz. I really love this song, and when I hear it I just want to be on the beach somewhere. This song has also been used for the promo reel at one of the local theaters for their summer movie series, so we have been hearing it every time we go to one of their screenings.
July’s mail club
The other print is titled Andromeda after the song by Weyes Blood. I made this piece last year and it was one of the first paintings I did on raw canvas. I chose the title because it reminded me of space, love, and infinite possibilities. This piece makes me think of going to the beach at night and looking at the ocean and sky. It can feel either completely terrifying or calming. To me it feels like the closest thing to being in space.
Speaking of space, we went to a handful of film screenings in June including my first time seeing Close Encounters of the Third Kind. One of our favorite things to do in Austin is go to Master Pancake screenings, where a group of comedians sitting in the audience will make jokes throughout the entire film. Typically, I only like to go to the ones where I have seen the movie before, but I ended up seeing both Misery and Close Encounters for the first time with comedic commentary and I think it made them even better.
Other film screenings we went to this month were Daisies (1966), The Virgin Suicides (1999), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), and The Trip (1967). I think the theme for this summer might be films from the 1960s.
I have a few summer projects in the works. One of them is learning new things not related to art. I especially love trying to learn things I wanted to do as a kid. The first one has been to learn how to swim without holding my nose lol. When I was really young I could do it but then one summer my body totally forgot how to and I got freaked out and have been holding my nose ever since. Now that we have a pool, I have made it my mission to learn. I’m starting to get the hang of it but I will tell you it still kind of freaks me out and I sometimes get water up my nose which is not fun. It is funny how long we can go without doing something just because there is a learning curve. It can be tough because that small period of learning can be so difficult (and sometimes painful) but once you get through it and finally figure it out, it is the best feeling in the world. So this month I invite you to try learning something new (or revisit something that you tried to learn) and try to make it through the learning curve. You never know where it might lead you.
If you would like to purchase July’s mail club mailing, you can shop past mail clubs here. Join The Club for August’s mailing by signing up here by June 15th.
Thanks for reading, thanks for being here. I hope you have a wonderful month!
Love & light
-anna