Field Notes: Staying with the Seasons

Notes on finding a seasonal cadence

These are Field Notes: real-time reflections prompted by The Artist’s Almanac as I make throughout the season.

These are my notes in the margins, where I scribble out my own words, reaching for what lies beneath.

Read the current edition of The Artist’s Almanac here.

Time Clipping Cupid’s Wings. Pierre Mignard, 1694

Hello! Spring is almost here. Consider supporting The Artist’s Almanac by ordering your copy of the spring edition, here.

Reader,

Earlier this week I had the realization that the spring equinox is only a month away. It seems the winter season is already leaving us.

This means I am already behind schedule in preparing the Spring 2026 edition of The Artist’s Almanac. Ironically, I created this series of chapbooks in an attempt to ground myself in the seasons as a creative.

Human seasons no longer correspond with natural seasons, and this is a problem for artists. Tomatoes are forced to grow year round, although their flesh in the winter season is pale and flavorless. A similar blandness is produced when artists are forced to cultivate and harvest year round.

I see creative work as a space for entering a deeper relationship with time. There must be a time for fallow fields. Everything needs rest, even the soil.

But art-making can also be restful, if we can learn to submit to the process itself. Once you do, you may find your creative senses operating on their own.

I’ll show you what I mean with some recent pieces.

Found photo & papercut

I’ve been keeping a bin of paper near my couch. It is full of tiny shards of paper from many failed papercuts. When I produce one I am pleased with, I am delightfully surprised.

There is this sense I’m beginning to get that the work will emerge on its own if I let it. Here, I cut a window in this paper cutting not knowing what would go inside it. Papercuts I like go inside an envelope until they find their place.

A few weeks after making this paper cut, I auditioned the photos I kept, and this one seemed to snap into place. It just feels like it came together on its own.

This is a test block I made from scrap fabric. I used sheets, pillowcases, and a thrifted dress to frame this motif from a toile fabric I have in my stash in a Monkey Wrench block. I’ve been practicing my hand piecing.

I’ve been writing the past few years in this newsletter with heavy use of patchwork metaphors. It’s been freeing to actually make patchwork. I am fully in the world of colors and shapes.

The past few years have been largely about building a relationship with my own imagination and intuition. I lived most of my life without access to this interior space. I gained access to it through relaxing into the seasons. There are seasons to collect, seasons to share, and seasons for fallow fields.

When I set out to make the almanac, I hoped to make a seasonal guide for artists in the most literal sense. I want to share in creativity, and show it as an inevitable process that unfolds when we let ourselves stay with the seasons.

I believe in the universal artist. I believe that art making gives us access to an inner world that helps us to survive the outer one.

A Preview of the Spring 2026 Artist’s Almanac

The winter 2025 Almanac focused on the themes of slowness, inwardness and reflection. The Spring edition I have in mind chases a wilder, unbridled kind of creativity.

The idea for this next season is taken from a book from the renaissance called “In Praise of Folly,” where Folly is personified as a goddess. In the text, folly says:

“...I wasn’t born on wandering Delos nor out of the waves of the sea nor ‘in hollow caves’, but on the Very Islands of the Blest, where everything grows ‘unsewn, untilled.’

At the time this book was written, folly was a human quality the dominate ideology sought to suppress. The renaissance valued reason and branded folly as wasted time. The theologian Erasmus wrote In Praise of Folly as a satire, showing that folly is inevitable in the human condition that no one is exempt from.

What can we learn from folly? The Spring almanac aims to explore what she might have to teach us. Creative work does not always grow in neat rows. Sometimes our need to control it stifles it. Next season, I hope to show creative practice as the cultivation of a personal island of the blest; a place we can grow unsewn and untilled.

To make this next printing possible, I will need your help via preorder. Preorders for the spring edition are available for $10 here! Additionally, you may purchase a whole year of almanacs for only $36 here.

Want to Contribute to The Artist’s Almanac?

I am quickly discovering this project may be too large for one person. To conceptualize, write, edit, and assemble an almanac every season sounds like a job for a team.

In the future I would like to assemble an editorial team, which would share the profit the almanac produces. If this sounds like something you’d like to be apart of, I’d love to hear from you!

Be Well,
Jeremy