There are two tired individuals in this house (and one tired dog with no excuse). Today we put up our biggest exhibit ever, with all 36 I Am More portraits and essays at the Salem State University Berry Library. Between breaking down the Paint Factory exhibit, wrapping, renting a van, loading, driving back and forth to Salem, unloading, PR (thanks Áine!), hanging (thanks Chris!), dog care (thanks Ulla!), graphic design (thanks Dylan!), all the way down to the details of cleaning and leveling the portraits, these two people are pooped.

In 2018 the first I Am More exhibit opened at the Paint Factory in Gloucester and now we’re returning with I Am More: Massachusetts for the first time in our home city.

I was talking with a young friend recently who said she had been thinking about I Am More and all the potential she saw in the project, and the inspiration it gives. She was full of ideas for collaborations and portrait subjects and she reminded me of someone I knew a while ago. Me.

You may remember the portrait of Yorkies Zoey and Prince from January. Well, they were actually the second portrait of dogs I was commissioned to do over the holidays. The first was top secret…until yesterday. So after quite a long time with no portrait commissions I had two requests in December within days of each other, and both were of dogs. But Copper was a dog I knew.

Nine years ago we bought an artist’s summer cottage as our new home. The artist who had created this space was Nell Blaine, and despite being confined to a wheelchair and limited to the use of her left hand, she left a catalogue of beloved paintings of her view and her gardens, with the help of gardeners and landscape designers. When we moved in Nell had been gone for sixteen years and the remaining garden designer gave us a tour of the acre property. There were rare native plants, a “fan garden,” hosta collection, a babbling brook…so many lovely things that met their demise when I took over, but that was just half the property. The rest was wild. And not just wild…angry wild.

“The best people.” That’s what our friend Kevin called Karen and Steven. He didn’t just say that, he said, “You HAVE to meet Karen and Steven, they are the BEST people.” I was looking for some theatre advice for my aspiring actress, and Kevin said Karen was the person to know, she managed one of the busiest theaters in the region and she would be happy to help. I thought Kevin was being naive that this incredibly busy woman would have time to help someone she had never heard of but I was wrong.

I cannot tell you how therapeutic it has been to spend my time staring at two beautiful little faces who are completely oblivious to the world around them.

We’re back. Today Iain and I put up the first I Am More: Massachusetts exhibit since March at the Wellesley Free Library. The library reached out to me over a year ago to suggest hosting the exhibit and I assumed it would be canceled like everything else, but they said, no, everyone needs art right now–it’s happening. It is a big beautiful library and the exhibit is in the lobby just inside the entrance, and in the Wakelin Room just off the lobby for the month of January. Thank you to the librarians, staff and volunteers in every community library.

These last few weeks there’s been another artist in the studio. As I draw at the wall she’s been curled up with her laptop, headphones on, drinking iced chai, clicking away. What started as a learned skill for a gift turned into a booming side-hustle for the musical theatre actor, who, like so many others, has no theatre.

Continue reading →

It’s been a year since I picked up a drawing pencil. The drawing wall has been a blank sheet of paper for twelve months and I haven’t cared. I wondered if I would ever care again. As has happened in the past, it took the lost of a beloved individual to get me moving again. Continue reading →