How to be in the world

in complexity and community

The Garden, The Body, now permanently installed at 600 Congress in downtown Austin.

Hi! My apologies for a long pause since the last letter. I made you a video to explain and share a new painting.

It’s a weird time. We’re all finding our way, to help, to survive, to adapt and find hope.

Here’s a painting I’m making with Gioia. I go into more detail in the video, but it’s been a fun and challenging process, sharing the canvas.

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The Garden, The Body is now permanently installed in the lobby of 600 Congress, at 6th and Congress in downtown Austin! This is the biggest sale I’ve ever made (with thanks to CoCollect), and especially lovely because just outside the building is the Lady Canoneer sculpture of Angelina Eberly, that my father’s sculpture club commissioned from Pat Oliphant for the space. I have treasured memories of meeting Pat, and he gave me a sketchbook with some of his drawings and encouraged me as an artist in my twenties.

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I’m proud of my dad, who recently published two remarkable things. One is about the women on death row in Texas, and the nuns who visit them, changing all their lives in profound ways. It’s a long form article in The New Yorker, and will most likely become a book.

The other is a novel called The Human Scale, for which he’s now on book tour. I didn’t want to read this book. The cover is literally a car on fire. It’s set in Palestine/Israel, and digs into the sides of that seemingly unresolvable conflict. Lots of bombing, torture, sadness, unrest. But since finishing the book, it’s stayed with me in ways I couldn’t foresee, and given a new facet to my understanding of humanity at large.

Both of these stories unveil a complexity that is far richer and messier than win and lose, right and wrong, good and bad. It’s the kind of complexity we need to embrace.