From My Practice
Everything Filling Berry’s Cup Lately
It’s been just about six weeks since I launched Practice Makes Present, and it has been such a joy to be part of this space. I’d be lying if I said the idea of starting something like this didn’t intimidate me a little, but the rumors are true. Substack is the most welcoming corner of the internet, and I am so, so happy to be here.
Practice Makes Present is an extension of the work I do with Art Life Practice, a place where alongside the makers and artists I admire, I get to pull back the curtain on my own creative life. What I’m making, what’s moving me, who’s in my orbit and changing the way I see things. My hope is that something here makes you want to go make something too, and these last few months have been so full of good things. Here are a few things that have inspired me.
San Francisco, With Friends
In late January I traveled to San Francisco with friends for the Fog Art Fair. We visited SFMoMA to see the Suzanne Jackson survey, a long time favorite of mine and one I had seen in November and simply couldn’t stay away from. We wandered the Japanese Botanical Gardens and took long walks along Lands End. We also ate very, very well! All of the SF hits: Zuni, Yank Sing, Greens, Tadich Grill, and a dinner at Chez Panisse I am still thinking about. And I got to see my dear friend Pato’s paintings at the fair, which was its own kind of joy. Art + nature + delicious food + dear friends. That’s my formula, and that trip delivered every last bit of it.
The Art I Can’t Stop Thinking About
In February at the Felix Art Fair, I had one of those stars align moments.
The work was by artist Raina Lee, someone I had been following since her show at Stroll Garden in November 2024, inspired by a summer in Paris. For that show, Lee made ceramic postcards from iPhone photos she took while traveling, then sculpted the objects in those postcards to recreate the feeling of a place and a moment. Tinned sardines, canelés, butter. A Giacometti figure. Monet’s Giverny. She started with a postcard and ended with an entire experience.
At Felix, she took that same concept somewhere new. This show was about paintings, works she had encountered at the Louvre, the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Frick. She begins each piece the same way: a 4x6 ceramic postcard, a small glaze painting made from an iPhone photo taken at the museum. That postcard becomes a study, a place to work out color and glaze combinations before she moves to the larger work, a ceramic sculpture of the painting itself. They can masquerade as traditional paintings, she says, but they have the sheen and bodily presence that only ceramics carry. She calls them “ceramic sculptures of paintings,” and together they become a room that feels like a mini museum of her past year.
Van Gogh’s Oleanders. Pissarro’s Still Life with Apples and Pitcher. Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. I share Lee’s deep devotion to art history and the museum-going experience, and encountering this work felt less like a discovery and more like a reunion. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
The Book I’ve Listened to Three Times
I’ll admit something slightly embarrassing: I have listened to Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny almost three times since the holidays. It is over twenty-four hours long. I have zero regrets. Desai’s characters are so fully realized, her descriptions of the smallest details so precise and alive, the worlds she builds so vivid that they never quite end when you close them. The narrator is magnificent, and any audiobook devotee knows that makes all the difference. It never fails to transport me completely. I cannot recommend it enough.
In The Studio
I’ve been trying to carve out more time for unstructured creative playtime lately, which can be next to impossible while also running a business, but I’m trying. More artist dates, more time at the Huntington Gardens with friends, more wandering through museums and galleries. Stepping away from the computer and finding inspiration from everyday beauty. And in the studio, the thing I keep returning to is collage, specifically making collages with imagery from our new Artist Series Collage Pad featuring the work of iris yirei hu.
Working with iris on this pad has been one of the great joys of this quarter. I remember the first time I visited her studio, in the summer of 2024. Stepping into her world, I felt it immediately. There is something supernatural and mystical about iris, as though she is deeply attuned to a realm that exists just beyond our senses, yet all around us. Her visual language is so distinctive and powerful, and there is always something new to discover. Our friendship was instant. We bonded over being fellow art educators, over shared philosophies around experimentation, over a deep reverence for nature, travel, and collecting objects from the natural world, and over all things supernatural. (We are in a coven. It meets on moon cycles. That’s all I’ll say.)
iris’s paintings possess a mystical, surreal quality, and I discover something different each time I look at them. Her Collage Pad features images of her paintings, travel photography, and archival imagery that inspires her practice, and I have to say, a lot of it is mysterious and wonderfully unfamiliar. The more time I spend with it, playing and manipulating the imagery, the more I find myself breaking through with new ideas and discoveries. Her Collage Pad launches TODAY (!!!) and I am so, so excited to share it with you! Go get your hands on it, you are going to love it!
What’s Next at Art Life Practice
So much good stuff is coming, and I am so, so excited to share it all with you. First, a new Guided Sketchbook is publishing with Hachette this September! I have been working on it for over a year and it has been such a fun, collaborative process. New prompts, new artist bios, so many updates — I truly cannot wait for you to get your hands on it.
And there is also something on the horizon very new to me...a Guided Sketchbook for kids. This one has been such a joy to develop, lots of creative playtime with my niece and nephew involved. More on that soon!
Both deserve their own posts, and they will get them. For now, thank you so much for being here. It means everything.
With love,
Berry
Practice Makes Present is the newsletter of Art Life Practice, a creative community dedicated to making art a part of everyday life. Through sketchbooks, workshops, and a vibrant community of makers, ALP believes that a creative practice isn’t something you have, it’s something you live.
Everything you make is an instant add to cart!!! I can’t wait for the new sketchbook, and to buy the kids version for my niece and nephew!! 🎨