Find That Thing You Can't Help But Do
My late Grandmother, Lucretia “Lu” found that thing. She sketched as freely as she breathed in the world and life around her. Whether it be the silly raccoons she fed outside her home in Cape Cod, or the more exotic penguins of Antarctica, she made marks on paper most days of her life.
Photo of Lu sketching on location, and scans of her sketchbooks.
Reconnecting with the woman who inspired my own thing while spending time in her studio on Cape Cod reminded me why, I too, can’t help but sketch my way through life. It’s what I do when I need to better understand the world around me. It’s how I break down complex questions and answers. Or how I convey the colorful thoughts trapped in my mind.
Yet, even though it’s my thing, some days it’s hard. I don’t sketch everyday. Nor is every sketch a masterpiece, but instead a messy process of untangling an idea, or many ideas all jumbled up. What I learned, while in Lu’s creative space, scanning all 103 of her known sketchbooks — she experienced this, too!
Finding that one thing you are naturally called to do does not mean it’s nirvana, or a perfect flow state where the work just pours out of you. Instead, it’s what keeps you inspired to work through the messy and often challenging steps of doing something. My grandmother was an award-winning artist and her journey spanned more years than I am old.
What I’ve learned, combing through her life’s works is this, she did it regardless of whether or not it was pretty. She experimented and played around. She observed more than she drew. She sketched in all sorts of weather and in every season. She bounced around between, pencil, pen, pencils, crayons, and watercolor paints. Often favoring a simple black ink pen of some form.
She sketched what fascinated her with curiosity and intrigue. Sometimes it was colorful, sometimes not. Her studio, filled with the reminders that her thing inspired other things, like the work of other artists, and how her passion for sketching could lead to new creations in the form of quilts and illustrated books.
Many days I struggle to do my thing, despite how much I love doing it, and seeing that my grandmother also met those same creative struggles is empowering. She left me more than a body of work to cherish and preserve. She left me a trail of breadcrumbs, clues and reminders to keeping doing my thing because it will lead to something special. But you will never know what that is unless you just do it.
For me, that looks like a sketched box on a clean page of my sketchbook. If I can just make that first mark, anything is possible from there!
Watercolor sketch of Lu’s Cape Cod studio by Max Romey, 2023.
