The big Reunion/Road Trip, Clockwise from top left (and not in chronological order): Lightning in the distance on the prairie behind birdwatching Joe, a family hike with cousins in Idaho, Henry with rocks in Mokashika State Park (Montana), Elody at Crystal Lake (also Montana), an old photo of an adolescent Elody modeling an ancestor’s wedding dress, a silly family selfie in South Dakota, and Henry & Loanne by Lake Erie.

Hi Everyone!

This is my first time missing a month! I wrote a draft of my August Newsletter in August and then promptly forget to finish it. My only excuse is… that I left Pennsylvania on August 1st for a two week trip and when I returned I got sick three different times with three different things with hardly a day in between, all while trying to move into my house, and continuing construction on other parts of the house with my dad. LOL.

My trip was a road trip to Idaho for a family reunion. My cousins are spread out all over the country (with groups in Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Iowa, California, Washington and Idaho, not to mention Germany!) so we get together every decade or so, and only some can make it. My mom, brother, nephew and I decided to do it as a road trip. We bird-watched the whole way across the country, seeing over 200 species in all different amazing habitats and landscapes. The reunion was really fun and up in the beautiful mountains north of Boise. On the return trip I flew, and it was during my flight, layover, flight cancellation, and being stuck in Chicago for 24 hours that I got sick the first time with some sort of stomach bug… which was, needless to say, just awful. 

I made it home just in time for a scheduled contractor to come, so the good news is that now my house finally has hot water! That was the last hurdle to the house being ready for me and my sweetie to move into the rooms on my side of the house. This was just in the nick of time, because he needed to be staying there for his teaching semester, which began on August 18th. So the rest of August was frantic moving and setting up the house for living. It is still a bit of a construction site, but every day the house is becoming more functional and more like a home. Slowly, I am unpacking or acquiring all the things that you realize you need when you set up a home… little luxuries like having an actual trash can in the kitchen instead of a plastic grocery bag hanging off the edge of a cabinet!

When I left NYC during Covid and moved into my sweetie’s cabin, it was already furnished and had kitchen stuff, so much of my stuff has been in boxes for over 5 years! So one of my first moving tasks was to unpack every box labeled “kitchen”, wash every musty item (they were stored outdoors), and start settling into my kitchen and deciding where things would go. After five years you forget what you own, so the rediscovery has been quite fun. Turns out, that some of my stuff is junk, like pots with broken handles, and some of my things are marvelous, like my wonderful collection of hand-made ceramics (many of my own and from friends from my undergraduate days in the ceramics department at Penn State, and some purchased from other ceramicists over the years.)

I have lived in various rentals and have moved into the homes of friends/partners/family in the past, but this is the first time I have moved into a place that is really mine. Not only that, but I am intending for this to be a permanent move, not a place that I am telling myself I will be leaving in five or ten years. So this move feels really different than past moves, and I am loving it so much. 

For this newsletter, all of my sections will be on the same topic, with a deeper look at my painted door and window trim project. So the Featured Project will be the process of making the trim, the Nature Spotlight will be the nature that is featured on the Autumn window, and my Superhero of the Month will be my bestie Stasya, who helped me design and paint the landscapes across the top.

Even though school has started, leaves are dropping, and the air is getting fresher and cooler, don’t forget that summer technically does not end until September 22. I wish you all have a moment or two to squeeze the final drops out of summer with some time in nature and sunshine, and as always, I wish you all the ability to stay sane and safe while coping with the larger and scarier whirlwinds happening nationally and globally.

Much love,

Elody

p.s. video of a walk I did last week around my place, on Insta and FB.

A peek at my colorful kitchen while I was getting settled into my new cabinets. I had just gone to a nearby farm stand and put the produce in bowls I made in my college days.

Top: The assembled window trim in place (testing that we made it the right size!) and the window and door trim pieces set up in my temporary studio inside the construction house. Middle and bottom: figuring out and transferring the corner designs.

Feature Project: Window Trim, Again!

I have talked about my window trim project in general and featured my Spring window and Summer door, but I want to talk a little more about the whole process and feature my Autumn window this month.

The first step, after deciding that I wanted to do this elaborate window trim, was to prepare the boards. The boards had to be high quality, very dry, and very straight, and it needed to be prepared and primed very well. I was not worried about the weatherproof and light-fastness of my paints, since I would be using my trusted mural paints, but even the highest quality of paint can peal off if the preparations are inadequate. Let’s just say there was a lot of sanding and many layers of stain-blocking, oil-based primer.

The second step was deciding my technical approach and designing the windows. I did a lot of sketching and testing. I had the idea that I would make simple, repetitive elements that I would carve as large linoleum stamps and then paint in. This would be a lot of up-front work with carving the stamps, but theoretically would make the actual design transfer and painting process quick and easy. It turned out that this worked well in my tests but really poorly in reality, with all kinds of unforeseen issues arising.

Above: Pages and Pages of sketching and thinking and designing

Below: My first tests with using hand carved linoleum stamps

Below: My first attempts at using stamps on the actual trim, which required total repainting thus proved not to be worth the trouble of making the stamps.

Finally, I settled into a new process. After abandoning the stamp approach, I switched to hand-drawing and doing trace-transfers. In this case, there was no longer a reason for repetition, so suddenly I had the freedom to make every element different. Therefore, the designs became a lot more complex. Oops! This was a problem because I had a deadline and had to finish all of the painted trim in time for the crew to be finishing up installing the siding and trim, so I had a frantic two months of dedicating my time to these.

After Painting all of the elements, there was the painting of the landscapes, which I will talk about in the “Superhero” Section, and some final edge work adding lines using tape, and lastly several coats of exterior varnish compatible with my mural paints. More pics below in the other sections, especially of the autumn scenes and the mushroom and landscape process.

TIMELAPSE: Here is a video compilation of some of my trim-painting on Instagram and on Facebook.

Top to Bottom: 1) A combination of free-sketching and trace-transferring the deer with pencil. 2) Quickly painting the outlines so I can see what I am doing. 3) Painting in the deer and the background. 4) Re-painting cleaner outlines for clarity and boldness.

Top: Progression of the right side panel with leaves, nuthatches, and boletes. Right: close-up of the finished left side panel. Bottom: finished white-tailed deer on the bottom panel.

Nature Spotlight: Autumn Window

White-Tailed Deer: Odocoileus virginianus, so common to so many of us in most of North America, but nonetheless is in my opinion one of the most beautiful and graceful mammals to grace this earth. I love that I get to see them all the time, whether standing alert and rotating their marvelous big ears or leaping magnificently on their long slender legs. On my property they are actually a rarity to see, unlike tame suburban deer they are secretive and skittish due to the popularity of hunting in the region. But they are there! I see them occasionally at dusk or dawn and often see their footprints.

Red-Breasted Nuthatches: Sitta canadensis is not nearly as common a sight as the White-Breasted Nuthatch in my area, but I get to see them poking around in the pines and hemlocks during the spring and fall migrations, and I find them to be absurdly cute and charming. I was seeing them a lot as I was designing the fall window so decided to include them as my bird for this one.

Autumn Leaves: I couldn’t narrow it down to just one fall tree, so my window features Sugar Maple, Red Oak, Eastern Hemlock and Sassafras leaves, all in their Autumn colors. I gathered some of each leaves around the property and used them as “live models” to get their fall colors accurate.

Bolete Mushrooms: The Baorangia Bicolor species of the bolete family, commonly known as the Two-Colored Bolete, or Red and Yellow Bolete, grows all over my property when conditions are right. It is a popular edible mushroom, though “caution is advised due to lookalikes and individual sensitivities” which my family discovered when we all tried them and all had some minor indigestion, so we generally don’t eat them anymore. Besides, they are not as delicious as the chanterelles and chicken-of-the-woods and oyster mushrooms that we have also found and eaten. However, they are beautiful mushrooms and I still enjoy seeing them!

Above: The finished Autumn window a few months after install on a snowy day.

Top row: Elody and Stasya in our college years, 18-22 ish years old. Middle row: at Stasya’s wedding in 2011. Bottom Row: photos from the infamous “Covid Headshots” in October of 2022, when we got together for an art weekend and to take new headshots of each other, and unknowingly were both hours away from coming down with Covid19.

Aug/Sept Superhero: Stasya Panova Erickson

I am unbelievably lucky to call Stasya my best friend. She and I met when we were 16, at an incredible full-scholarship 6 week summer art program, the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts. PGSA was government-funded and sadly no longer exists due to budget cuts. In any case, Stasya and I met and became friends in the milieu of the 200 teens in the program, but it was just one new friendship among many. However, because she lived in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, which was only 45 minutes away from where I lived, she was one of the geographically closest of these new friends. So, a few months after the program ended, I was able visit her for a sleepover. That day, hanging out one-on-one, we discovered we had incredible friendship chemistry, and stayed up late talking excitedly for hours.

[Side note: Incidentally, my two other closest friendships, with Eric Schoon and Prachi Gupta, are also friends I met at PGSA but became close with later, at Penn State and in Brooklyn respectively.]

In the twenty-odd years since that day, we have never lived in the same place for more than a summer, or gone to the same school, or otherwise had a friendship that was convenient for either of us. However we have always managed to make time for our friendship, for phone calls and visits, for laughing and crying together, and for celebrating milestones. Most fun of all, we have also made time for collaborating and making art together. In fact, we even did our undergraduate thesis art projects as a collaboration together, even though we were both in BFA programs at different schools. We both somehow convinced our schools to give us research/grant funding to do a trip together (a month exploring Russia and Southwest China) as part of our preparations for that show, that we then exhibited at both Penn State and Syracuse Universities. But that’s a whole other story!

Stasya is one of those rare extroverts who is also sensitive, intuitive, empathetic, attentive, and deep-thinking. She is intelligent, talented, and funny (and of course very beautiful, as you can see from her photos above!) Her charisma and kindness charms everyone she meets, and I still can’t quite believe that I am among the lucky chosen ones in her life. We have influenced each other profoundly in many ways. Interestingly, if you had asked us when we were both 20 which of us would be the professional artist, and which would be doing community work professionally, I think we both would have thought that she would be the artist and I the community arts person. That was when I was just getting into community murals, and I talked her into joining me for a summer organizing and creating a mural together in Harrisburg. Afterwards, she got a job working at a community arts organization, and the rest was history. Now she works for L’Arche, an organization that “works to advance inclusion and disability leadership through our organizational practices, public engagement, and impact strategies.” Basically, a network of communities where people with and without disabilities live together. Stasya helps to coordinate and support these communities all over the east coast.

Stasya is also a mother of two amazing young boys, Sev and Milo, and is married to a pretty amazing man, Andy. Despite being busy with her family and career, she somehow still manages to nurture a rich community of friendships. We try to get together about once a year (in addition to any other time we have seen each other with our families/partners) just the two of us to really spend time together, play in nature, and make art together. Sometimes we meet in the Poconos at a lovely cottage that her mother owns. Two years ago, instead of doing this, she came to me so that our art project could be to work on this window trim project.

When I first began this painted trim project, I asked her to collaborate with me. So all the way through from the very beginning, I had kept her in the loop and bounced ideas off of her. In addition to talking through the project and getting her ideas and feedback, I got her direct involvement in two ways:

The First is I asked her to create the mushroom designs for the corners, and she sent me the sketches that she made and I did trace transfers of her drawings and then painted them in.

The Second is that she came for an in-person weekend visit where we designed and painted the landscapes at the top of the windows, entirely collaboratively, sketching, drawing, and painting on top of each other, switching places, working in layers, and working out the problems until each painting worked. Due to the very long, narrow, horizontal format, each landscape is like an exaggerated panorama. Each composition, therefore, is a largely invented composite image of many landscapes. We used reference photos of nearby landscapes to help us, but we were mostly drawing and painting from our imaginations and memories.

Stasya is on of my absolutely favorite people in this world. I am so grateful that I did not have to do this project, or life in general, without her!

Above: Stasya’s mushroom sketches. Below: Stasya’s Landscape Sketches.

Below: Stasya and Elody collaboratively painting the landscape panels in Gary’s shop.

Sirona Falls