Last month we went to our first Dune meet-up, and through the course of the evening, I fell in love. Although I’ve known a handful of lovely artists while living in Seattle, I never found a community that felt like just the right fit. Dune felt like that fit right away.
Once a month, local artists get together over food and drinks at a local restaurant and spend hours scrunched on small cafe tables with drawing supplies strewn about. With heads tilted down towards their papers, people visit while they work. The cafe lighting is rather dim, music plays over the speakers or perhaps someone brings a guitar, and over it all is the rolling cacophony of conversational snippets about everything from Australopithecus to farting unicorns.
The goal is to complete an original work, there on-site, and each artist’s subject matter is as varied as the artists themselves. Most anything goes, and at the end of the night everyone submits their drawings and some cash to fund the printing of a zine full of the evening’s artwork.
The first week, Benjamin and I found a small two-person cafe table tucked behind a column in the middle of the room. It was a great vantage point to observe the flow of the evening and get the lay of the land. Last night we arrived earlier, so we were able to tuck into a corner booth, which is always my preference anyway. After we we’d finished eating and were well under way, three others joined us at our table and set to work. It was nice to meet some new people, and I especially enjoyed getting to see their creative process and watch them work.
My piece for the September meet-up officially launched my Space Snails series into orbit! I’ve had space snails on my mind for months and I’ve played with them at home, but I hadn’t sent any out into the world yet. I knew that I wanted my first Dune piece to be a Space Snail, and I had a lot of fun executing it in black-and-white with ink. (All of my studies at home so far have been in color). It was also a fun challenge to write a little verse to accompany the snail and play with some alliteration. And it was such a treat to see my lovely little space snail in print when we picked up our zines this week!
For this October meet-up, I wanted to feature our vehicle. We’re just days away from a major trip that we’ve been saving and planning for for 1.5 years. For the last couple of years we’ve felt our time in Seattle was waning and we’ve traveled around on weekend outings to assess where we might like to end up next. In the absence of that next-place appearing to us, but with it evident that it was nevertheless still time to leave, we planned some extended travel instead.
This piece ended up turning into a break-up piece and actually afforded me some closure for our Seattle chapter thus far. Without intending to, I wrote a piece to accompany this drawing. You can read it on my writing blog. Apparently, there’s a lot I have to say to this city. It feels good to be saying it now, but this just begins to touch on it all.
So in four days we’ll drive out of the city and into the forest. Then we’ll hop from forests, National parks, coasts, state parks and the like through 9 states through the winter and into the Spring. During this time we should get some answers and we’ll return from our travels ready to start building our next life chapter.
Snail spins slowly in space… 💛
