It was an absolute delight to meet with Anna Chapman Parker recently to talk about her new book “Understorey: A Year Among Weeds”.
We talked about drawing and writing as practices of attentiveness, the elasticity of time, the sensitivity of line, the value of failing, and the power of interruptions to break our daydream of automaticity.
Anna’s book also features her delicately responsive ink drawings of everyday ‘weeds’. Over the course of a year she draws these vigorous, opportunistic plants, that find their way into the cracks of our built environment, right there on the spot, in some equivalent unused ‘crack’ in her otherwise busy days.
It’s a wonderful, tenderly observant book that one level is about the value of those plants we call weeds, but is also about drawing, attention, care, time, and how to find space to maintain a creative practice as a mother of small children. Anna shows us that, like a weed, our creative life can germinate, grow and even flourish in the smallest, most unpromising cracks we can find in our day.
…I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did!
Life Raft Co-Working
A quick invitation to join us for this week’s Life Raft Co-Working session, Wednesday at 3pm UK time. It’s the same link each week so bookmark it, set yourself a reminder and come join us for some quiet time to work together on our creative projects, whatever they may be.
And if you can’t join us live, here’s last week’s replay:
May you find ways to flourish in the cracks this week,
– Sam
Thank you, as always, for joining me in this little Life Boat. She sets sail every Wednesday. I appreciate that not everyone can afford a paid subscription, but you can support my work in other ways by using the like, comment or re-stack buttons you’ll find at the bottom or top of this email. It really does help others who might enjoy reading to find my newsletter and climb aboard our Life Boat.
If you’d like some support with a writing project or would like to explore how writing can help your visual art practice to flourish, read the post below to find out more about my mentoring work.
Getting into the weeds with Anna Chapman Parker