Here it is October. I’ve been away from my blog for so long that Wordpress has updated and is now FORCING me to use blocks. Which means it took me about five minutes to figure out that I needed to add a text block to the layout to be able to begin typing. Ahhh technology. It makes your life easier, right?

So lots of life things broke loose just after New Years that caused me to take a bit of a creative hiatus. Everything’s fine in my personal world, I just had to prioritize other people, house tidying and fixing, and higher paying jobs for a bit. Personal work always suffers when that happens. So I didn’t get a whole lot of that done this year. Some. Not a lot.

Anyway, as soon as the Narrative Award was announced this year, I immediately had an idea but then put it off (see priorities above) until literally the 11th hour when I swept the clutter from my art table and threw these pieces together.

My whole life, people keep telling me to work bigger BIGGER! This is generally good and freeing advice. Unless you’re me. And that’s a very funny thing for a former scenery designer/painter to say. I’m happier working small. And in this case, it made the work go faster and forced me to loosen up and work in the parameters. I did have a bit of a breakdown partway through because I didn’t think I’d be able to finish on time after almost two months of noodling the drawings in my head. But I did. Project-Runway-Make-It-Work style in under 36 hours! So I’m pretty proud of that but it’s not my favorite way to work. 

This year’s Narrative Award assignment: “2019 is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission’s moon landing. In recognition of this iconic event, the 2019 assignment is to submit a narrative sequence involving a ground-breaking journey, whether historical, personal, or imagined.”

So of course I went historical. In retrospect, I should have used the couple’s (nonexistent here) child as the main character. So when (if) I redo it, he’ll be there. Now, this is actually a true story. It’s not my story. It’s a story one of my friends told me about her family coming to New York over a hundred years ago…