Every year when the Peonies bloom out our front door, I try to paint a quick sketch of them. Sometimes I miss the window - they bloom for such small amounts of time, and if they do so while it’s rainy… My paintings never do them justice, but I get a little better each year. I feel like this one has promise. If my feelings about it don’t change in the near-future, I may take this from a sketch to a more finished piece. Really just tightening up the peonies in focus, adding some stuff to justify the background, and then cropping it for a good composition.

100 Days

Hello, and welcome to my newsletter generally, and the beginning of what I’m mentally calling “100 Days of Sketching” more specifically. Firstly, before I do anything else, let me say an enormous “Thank You!” to you for joining my newsletter. That anyone might like me or my art enough to willingly sign up for 100 consecutive days of zechartspam(tm) is a huge honor! I’m gonna try and make pretty pictures that do justice to your choice.

That’s it, really. You could stop reading now and just enjoy the pictures of paintings if you want. If you’re slightly more curious about this project though, I wanted to spend a few minutes writing about what I’m doing here and why, as this is a new and scary direction for me. Actually, more honestly, this is really me finally coming to a decision about how I want to share my art with the world and beginning to do that.

First and foremost, this 100 Days project is about getting into the habit of sharing my work as I make it. I’ve been drawing and sketching for a bit over 30 years now, and painting for close to 15. In that time I’ve gotten reasonably good at the making of nice pictures. I just was never very focused on sharing the paintings after they were made. A lot of that was probably due to some perfectionistic tendencies I have around the things I create. Some of it is due to general shyness. And there’s honestly probably also some that comes from a desire not to take up space where I’m not wanted. I’m trying to change that by sharing what I make every day for 100 days straight. I’m trying to build the habit of sharing my work as the final step of creating. I am at a point where I generally like the paintings I make, and feel like others (you) might like them too.

This is also an attempt to connect with people that appreciate the things that I make. Having a direct line to share my paintings with people that want to see them is a nifty thing. I feel like a newsletter does this in a few unique ways. Both you and I can be sure that you will see the things I send you (unless they end up in spam) without relying on an algorithm to roll a die to determine wether you see my work or an advertisement or some other post that’s performing well with other people like you. It’s opt-in , which means that only those who actually care to see my work will see it. The added “resistance” provided by needing to sign up for this newsletter also (hopefully) means a reduction to the general negativity bred on the internet-writ-large. This means I’m willing to share my work and the stories around its creation more readily. My drawings and paintings tend to function a lot like my visual journal of places I go, people I meet/spend time with and personal life experiences. Having that just loose on social media for any thoughtless commenter to have their way with has always left me ill-at-ease and for that reason and probably several others I haven’t felt comfortable sharing as much about my work as perhaps I would like to. With a newsletter, you can see my work as I make it, reply to my emails if you wish to talk about the work, and I can reply to you all within the context of knowing that everyone is here for the same reason - the drawings/paintings.

The newsletter provides the opportunity to share more of my creative process as a journey, unencumbered by worry about how well a given image will “perform”. Truth is, not everything I make turns out. Sometimes I’m exploring new subject matter that I’m unfamiliar with and unconfident handling pictorially. Sometimes I’ve slept poorly and the painting reflects that. Sometimes the weight of the world holds me back from creating with the joy I usually do and it shows in the finished work. I love the fact that this method allows me share these pieces, talk about how and why they didn’t work as I’d hoped, extrapolate on how I might do things differently or better next time, and it all adds context to my body of work instead of “underperforming”.

The way this newsletter and website platform (I’m using the ghost.org platform) work together also means that all my newsletters to you also double as posts/images on my website, with the text readable and a comments section at the bottom for those interested in interacting as well. It means that this project can build up a public record of my work as well as being a communique to you. Keeping a current website has never been one of my strengths, so the two-birds-one-stone method this provides will hopefully be invaluable.

Paintings are not created in a vacuum, but rather within the context of the artist’s life. The Newsletter/website method of sharing allows me to adopt a more experimental approach to sharing my work. I don’t have to communicate only in images, or only in text. I can share the painting, but I can also talk about what I was thinking and influenced by on a given day. I can try my hand at creating a quick film that attempts to convey the experience I had while painting a given thing. I can try to communicate things that I feel are important concepts or ideas in unique and cross-media ways. I think so much of what’s fun and engaging about other artist’s work is getting to understand the context in which they created their work, and it can often times be tricky to piece together that context due to the nature of different platforms and the fragmentation of different types of content. This publishing method allows me to share in many different mediums - images, text, film. I hope the opportunities to provide meaning and context in this more customizable way allow for a density of meaning that push the things I make into a more “longform” context - something that provides a number of methods of engaging with my work and ideas if you want that. And, of course, if you’re just here for the pretty pictures, you can always just look at those - no hard feelings!

Ultimately though, I think I’m just excited to be trying to share my work in a way that feels good to me. Not beholden to social media platforms/companies and the whims of their curation. This newsletter feels like a better way of building community and developing relationships with others who are interested in my work. It feels like a more solid way of connecting to people. It feels like something that both you and I have a bit more agency over.

More tomorrow,

-ZR