A Beautiful Week in Many Ways

Morning!

I’m sitting in a café in Brookline, MA, with the baby in a stroller. Here for a fellowship gathering. Delightful to be away – among people, away from routines.

I keep wanting to tell you (you: working artist who is planning to have a kid) that since I had my older kid, it’s not that I’ve been having any fewer ideas – it’s that the follow-through feels less urgent. Ideas don’t always get written down. When they do, they don’t always get turned into drawings. When they do, they rarely get submitted or posted. Sometimes when I post something these days, it’s too rough of an idea, I haven’t taken the time to revise it. (All these steps, in the past, used to be simultaneous). I have less logistical brain these days, and less need to connect, and both were needed to push past my natural floatiness and extreme self-consciousness. Urgency is a good editing tool. Without it I have no sense of which of my ideas people might want to see. I️ just checked and I️ have 302 drawings—the kind I️ used to post on Instagram—that I️’ve made and scanned into my computer and haven’t put anywhere.

But the ideas are here, and right now, I’m feeling so lucky to get to have them, if only just to myself. I’ll tell you a dangerous secret: I️ think my work is better when I’m not tailoring it to what I️ think people will want to see. More breadth. More weird.

Here are some more drawings I’ve made.

I’ve been working on this book project What to Do When—a list of rules to follow for existing in your body, in public, and among people you’re close to. It’s an exhaustive exercise in explaining myself to others—a need of mine that, paradoxically, is hard to relate to. Been putting off showing it to you till I figure out how to handle images/layout. I feel like this is the key, somehow, to making the book accessible. I feel like the most accessible would be to get rid of 99% of the words and have each page be a funny, emotional, evocative picture—something Maira Kalman would do, or David Byrne. But that’s not what the book wants to be. It wants to be wordy. It wants you to understand.

And there my logistical brain and need to follow through sputters out, and I’ve been putting off finishing this book for an entire year. I’ve been working on it, I’ve been enjoying it, but if no one is going to understand it the way it wants to be, why bother finishing it? At least – that’s what my deluded heart is saying.

But I️ also know there’s nothing like a finished thing. A finished thing that’s not twisted in knots in hopes of being understood. I️ am so grateful to everyone who’s made things like this, that I️ get to look at and read.

Going to attach a short picture-less chapter here. I️ posted the first chapter, Feelings, a few weeks ago. Next week, more, hopefully with pictures. I️ really would love your feedback. Sometimes - I’ll admit this embarrassing fact - it takes me a few weeks to look at your comments, because I️ am so so so self-conscious. But I️ really want the feedback.

Here goes:

Chapter 2: THINGS

(Oh, and first, some housekeeping stuff!

Buy your prints here

your books here

And, I’m selling redrawn originals again - $250 for a redrawn version of a drawing of your choice. You can email me a screen shot at lianafinck@gmail.com .