The Sketchbook Confessional is a blog where I recap all of the art that I made in a month, as well as what I’m reading, watching, writing, and up to as far as exercise.

Art:

This month I waded back into oil painting with a few paintings of the Boulder Flatirons.

I had a lot of fun painting in my watercolor paper in my Traveler’s Notebook. I discovered the magic of taping off the edges of the paper and painting within a little square or rectangle. Oddly I have never tried this before and I really enjoyed it.

I painted a few fish in watercolor on paper that I’d purchased on my Paris trip in 2017. I’m glad I saved the paper for these rainbow trout, though next time I think I will use it sooner, haha.

Speaking of documentation, In January of 2023, I finished reading several books and also blogs covering my thoughts about the books, as well as art related blogs. I find that when I’m caring for my baby, I always have time to either jot down a few sentences on my phone or read my kindle. Here are all the blogs I finished this month:

My Magic Paper Menagerie

All Art is a Force of Optimism

Painting Fish

Boulder Falls

Brainard Lake and Long Lake

Leadville tiny waterfalls

Red Rocks Trail

Painting the Boulder Flatirons

New Mt. Elbert Painting

Quote blog: “All art is quite useless” - Oscar Wilde

Book blog: The War of Art - Steven Pressfield

Book blog: Never Finished - David Goggins

Book blog: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

Boom Days Rocks

In January I created a couple new designs that I figured I would upload to Society6.

Overall I had a lot of fun making the above design using goauche, acrylic, and watercolor on duralar.

I made several oil paintings this month. I have had a lot of fun ‘drawing’ with oil paint, which I’ve done before - what I end up doing is laying down a thin layer of white or offwhite paint and then drawing into the paint with a dark color like teal. Impasto or thick painting is pretty unpredictable but drawing with it is at least a little controllable.

I stayed on two subjects this month, mountains and nudes, which I plan to continue throughout the year now that I feel better painting in oil again. I stopped for a while out of concerns for breastfeeding and while I was pregnant with my baby. If you’ve ever smelled oil paint you will probably understand this, haha. It’s nice to be back.

The painting of Mt. Elbert that I made at the end of December dried out this month though it did take a while.

What I’m reading:

I had what I think of as a huge literary accomplishment this month. I finished reading the first three books of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. I started reading it in 2020 and put it down for a few years, and only recently in 2023 have I powered through the last 30% in about a week where it was too snowy to go outside and I was too overwhelmed by the idea of brushing the snow off my car and chipping at the ice on my windshield. I had also run out of books to read and it was my last book I could read for free before buying a new one. This is also how I ended up reading as much Proust as I did, if I am on an airplane for a long time or stuck indoors somewhere I do end up reading books that otherwise seem impossible to scale.

I decided to start drawing pages from Botns as warmups on my tablet.

I think Severian is an interesting character because he does so many unlikeable things yet he does his best in all the terrible situations he finds himself in. He’s way more likeable to me than the character in Dune. Anyways, I’ve drawn some Botns stuff before and I’m excited to do more of it.

I think Botns is hard to read because of the violence. Otherwise it’s worthwhile. If anyone were to read this blog and start reading Botns for the first time afterwards they’d probably be like “omg why does she like this book, this is horrendous.” All I can say is it gets better at the end or in the last half. The language or writing is good the whole time but I liked the last half of the plot a lot more than the first half. I’m now reading through book 4, which feels like an afterwards, yet is still a part of the series.

This month I also finished Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art and The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, along with the new David Goggins book.

Running

I did walk a bit in January and squeezed in a couple 1 mile runs around Chautauqua. On a couple days, I hiked with my baby and my easel and a diaper bag, for a total of 42 pounds of weight I was carrying around. I sort of couldn’t believe I was doing this, but I did gain about 40 pounds while pregnant so maybe it’s not so different from how I spent most of 2022.

I knocked out a 7 mile run at the end of January and was glad to feel like I’ve completely gotten Covid out of my system after a rough couple months of residual symptoms. The first 3 mile run that I did after having Covid felt horrendous, I felt like I’d never be the same. Luckily I got over it, somehow, and am running back at my 2021 levels. It took about 8 weeks to feel better. After having my baby I was able to knock out a 6 mile run pretty easily, so I think Covid was harder on me than having my baby, strangely enough. I hope I never get it again.

Until next time -

What I like most about David Goggins is that he keeps challenging the parts of himself that he doesn’t like. In both his first book and Never Finished, he often splits himself into two personas: David, and Goggins, where David is a person to transcend, and Goggins is his transcended ultimate self, his truest, best self.

I think that this approach is good, first of all, because it’s on Goggins’ own terms. Nobody else is pushing him to be the way he is except for him. The split persona approach might work for many people, because it allows all of us to confront the parts of ourselves that we dislike as if they are people who are separate from us. It’s a compartmentalization of the old and new, and parts of ourselves that work well for us vs. parts that do not.

I read Can’t Hurt Me a few years ago. I tend to read many nonfiction books at once, and Can’t Hurt Me felt like someone was finally being real with me and telling me the truth while others were serving up platitudes and embellishments. Maybe ‘truth’ isn’t the right word for it, and neither is ‘accountability’. What DG does in his first book is radical self-confrontation. He hones in on himself and his goals and ends up being a Navy Seal. He continues this in Never Finished in the form of ‘evolutions’ as chapters. Each chapter is biographical and also interspersed with applications. It usually takes the form of a few pages of biography, and a few paragraphs of applications. I personally found this cadence to be useful and worth imitating. The format of a personal anecdote followed with advice or broader application is something I resonate with.

What I like a lot about Never Finished is DG provides a few highlight tools to perform radical self-confrontation. In the first couple chapters, he recommends recording your own voice and also listening to your haters, or reading every comment. I think this is wonderful, because I’ve never heard more discomfort than from people who record their own voice, and also the popular adage is to never read the comments.

Several years ago I was one of those people too who hated the sound of my own voice, and I ended up getting rid of this by listening to myself over and over. And frankly I’m going to read the comments anyways, and DG had some good advice in his book on what to do with those. It’s not what you might expect so I won’t spoil it.

The title of Never Finished is perfect, as Goggins does believe that when most of us say we are doing 100 percent in life and physical feats, we are actually doing about 40 percent. If phoning it in is the most horrible feeling in the world, leaving it all on the field is the best feeling in the world.

The idea of self-leadership that Goggins discusses in this book is another good idea. It was my favorite concept in the whole book. Again I won’t spoil it or summarize, all I will say is this concept, for me, is one of the most important concepts to review and re-read.

Ultimately, I loved this book and I found so much wisdom in it that I plan on re-reading it often. I can’t think of two people on the planet who are more different than me and David Goggins, yet I find his work highly relatable. The one thing we do have in common is Leadville - I grew up there, and Goggins has run the LT 100 at least twice. I’ve never done the hundred, yet, maybe this is the most exciting aspect of Ultrarunning. It’s an equalizer, where people of different backgrounds, ages, and races all run the same trail but each experience is wildly different. DG’s voice is like this - it’s a challenger and an equalizer. It seeks to bring us all up to the same level. I don’t think a book can have a better mission than that.