wendy macnaughton

When we draw together, we see, listen, and grow. Aspen Ideas: Health attendees are doing all of the above with @drawtogether.studio 🎨 #aspenideashealth

Best week ever at the National Gallery of Art in DC. Honor of a lifetime to give a 45 min talk on the intersection of my work and Dorothea Lange’s photography (process, seeing people, social work, collaboration, accountability. The 3rd photo is of Dorothea and me atop our respective mobile studios: she photographing, me drawing 90 years later. So nuts.) I was so nervous and felt out of my league - but also somehow also just right? Mostly I didn’t barf on stage, so… success! The next day the @ngadc staff and I hosted DrawTogether Strangers for hundreds of people, young and old, in the East building’s atrium under the giant Calder mobile. The NGA public program staff were ROCKSTARS. With their help, former strangers took a leap, sat down and drew, really really SAW each other, and laughed real hard and walked away smiling. Some even continued talking and got lunch! Also we went rogue w the aesthetic, ignored the new fancy Pentagram museum branding, and made handlettered cardboard DTS signs and little take-away cards for the table w links to the free DTS toolkit to help folks host this experience in their own community. Unexpected gift: so many @drawtogether.studio families came by, and kids brought their artwork from the pandemic to show me (😭😭😭) and DrawTogether Classrooms educators came by, and so so so many DT Grown-Ups Table members visited and got to meet each other IRL. I just about died. In fact, pretty sure I’m dead. Hugest gratitude to Dena (deeeennaaa!) and Chris and Ali and the whole NGA public programs crew, and the amazing NGA film crew, and curator Philip Brookman, all of whom helped make this special week happen. A total dream come true. And big love to the handsome BF @kylerw who was the best 24/7 support (Design! Editing! Emotional anchor! Comedic relief!) this nervous eager artist could ask for. ❤️❤️ Hopefully the Dorothea talk will be online soon, and a video the NGA film crew made about DTS will be up soon too! (And more DTS news coming soooon.) And now REST. ✏️=👁️=❤️ #DrawTogetherStrangers #DrawTogetherGUT

Today my new book “How to Say Goodbye” comes out. I wrote about what it means to me, and what it - and a really, really hard year - taught me about loss and letting go and making art. And, eventually, growth. (Swipe to read.) The little book is mostly drawings, and I’ll do another post about that and the contents of the book shortly. But today, this personal context felt right to share. It’s all words so 40+ fam, grab your readers. There is a link to buy How to Say Goodbye via an independent booksellers in my bio. Select “Bookshop” and use the code HOWTOSAY and you’ll get 10% off. Thank you @bloomsburypublishing 🙏 And finally to clarify the acronym: the GUT = the Grown-Ups Table, the weekly newsletter/art lesson/community I publish that was a lighthouse in the storm of last year. (Thx GUT peeps.) Link to join that in my bio, too. Book is out. Cards on the table. And with that, there you have it. That’s my art. That’s my heart. Onwards. ❤️

**Constraints** A week into the woods I realized I didn’t have the brushes I wanted. I didn’t have anything I wanted, really. I could have ordered the brushes on amazon for next day delivery (and checked email and the news and Instagram) but instead I resisted the urge and kept it simple and small and worked with what I got. I made the brushes from plants and trees found around my studio at @macdowell1907 . Also neon pink artists tape. There’s a chart of the marks they make in here and the last image is the woods painted with the woods. Is it great art? No. But it was a great lesson in constraints. We *need* constraints to make art - nothing to push against is death to an artist - and these days, with infinite everything available to us all the time, constraints may also may be the key to happiness. #FullWitch (I used the brushes I had on hand to draw the brushes I made - so meta.) 💚 Ps - shout out to my fave tree brush maker @ishitajain24 💚

Proudest of my mom. Happy Mother’s Day to all the caregivers of creatures, and big hug to everyone for whom today is hard. What a life.

Thank you @macdowell1907 for nearly seven weeks working in the woods. And thank you everyone at home who made it possible for me to go knowing that @drawtogether.studio - the GUT, Classrooms, and the DT studio, not to mention my real life - was in such good hands… I had no idea how much I needed the time and space. I deeply miss my little studio in the woods, where I worked and slept, and the absence of life’s urgency and distractions and variables. It took a while to get used to it, but after that I could hear myself again. An artist residency is a surreal life completely outside of time and reality. It’s a pipe dream, really. And like any utopia it has a million problems of its own. But what a residency like this offers is invaluable especially these days: a respite. With no internet and barely any cell service where I worked and slept, it offered a place/space to get back in touch with what’s always inside me, and all of us, even when our daily life’s noise makes it nearly impossible to hear. Thank you @macdowell1907 for the gift of time and space, and all my fellow fellows which is to say friends. What a journey.

Thirty two mornings. One window. Two seasons. Wood studio @macdowell1907

Studio timesheet drawing, made over six weeks and two days at @macdowell1907 - one line for in, one line for out.

Status.

In a fast-moving world, drawing can be a quiet act of presence, connection, and care 🖌️ Through her DrawTogether project, artist Wendy MacNaughton (@wendymac ) is inviting people of all ages to pick up a pencil and rediscover the joy of creating. Because sometimes, art isn’t about the final product... it's about re-discovering yourself and the world around you. ➡️ Scroll to see the power of drawing in action at #AspenIdeasHealth!

#2763 in the collection of notes found tucked in a book that I wrote but have no memory of writing

Gorgeous independent art and design publication @uppercasemag featured my call to drawing and creative action on its back cover. Huge honor for me, but a more important global point: use value. Buy a copy = support independent publishing, then tear off the back cover and pin it to your wall, or better yet get a can of spray glue and when nobody is looking, post it on a building in a high traffic downtown area, then run like the wind. Pls don’t actually do that. Or pls do but just don’t get caught. YOU DO YOU. ❤️✏️❤️ Thanks Janine Vangool the superstar being @uppercasemag and for your refusal to incorporate any use of AI-generated art in your mag, and hats off to Laura Slobodian and @lillarogers for the great front cover art, and pretty sure we have some @drawtogether.studio Grown-Ups Table members’ art in the mag - holler so I can shout you out. Everything is better….