Open the Gate

A non-letter, project updates, and a children’s book about an artistic spider

Contour drawing. ©️ A. Cowen

“The distinction between the past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” — Albert Einstein

Hello!

I’m not sending a letter today. The letter is sitting next to this one, an adjacent file that was dated and titled as today’s draft. Even today, I let myself wade through its streams, wanting to share bits and pieces but deciding to let it sit. It’s too boring for most, too convoluted for some, too nitty-gritty for its own good, and certainly unfinished. It isn’t happy about being shelved. It isn’t poetic, but it thinks it can be woven. It already contains some discoveries. For now, it’s just too much, and I am still in the middle of an expedition, one without a map.

In deciding not to write a letter, I figured I should explain why.

Not surprisingly, that turned into some kind of letter of its own, one that is a collage of images, some printed, some hand-drawn, some splattered and sanded, and then everything assembled into a version that seems simultaneously whole and not whole. There is a bit of pink, a flash of orange. There are stitched lines and, of course, there is hatching, a plethora of hatching, tally marks of existence.

The letter to explain there not being a letter goes something like this.¹

Later, I say, turning from the adjacent file and switching to work, a headache slowing my movements, my eye stinging from where I absently touched it hours after coating my neck in Icy Hot.²

There are so many doors, windows, gates, and portals. How are they hidden or disguised? What do they hold in or keep out? Which ones are you ready to open or pass through? What happens next?

On my mind this week, the FDIC, anxiety, butter sparking in the microwave, personal ethics, rejection, being unfriendable, learning in public, and being lost.³

I’m not sending a “letter” today, but thank you for checking the mail “in case.”

What you’ll find below: weekly journal spread, the postcard prompt, week two of my 100 day project, and a sweet children’s book about a young artist who lives in an art gallery.

It is Women’s History Month. One of the names you’ll see pop up here and there is Marie Tharp, the cartographer who mapped the ocean floor. Her work dispelled the idea that the bottom of the ocean is flat and supported theories of plate tectonics and continental drift. I love her story as one of tracking edges where there seem to be none and going to great depths to find meaning.

“The whole world was spread out before me (or at least, the seventy percent of it covered by oceans). I had a blank canvas to fill with extraordinary possibilities, a fascinating jigsaw puzzle to piece together: mapping the world’s vast hidden seafloor.” — Marie Tharp⁴

Thank you for reading.

Amy

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Illustrate Your Week, Week 10

It was a playful journal week that started with the masked portrait, based on an image from Pexels. We spent two years in Louisiana while I was in graduate school, so the image was a nice container to work on while I thought about those contours, fuzzy at best. There were birthdays, a bit of Seuss, a tradition, an earworm, and a disappointing tarot pull. There were things I planned to include and didn’t get to. Every week brings its own blend.

Week 10 illustrated journal pages. ©️ A. Cowen

I see lots of illustrated journals coming and going, which is wonderful. Just remember, there is no single way to do it. Documenting your own life in words and text isn’t a competitive sport.

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Week Two of 100 Days of Contours

Days 8-14 of this 100-day series of contours with rainbow topography.

I’ve continued to play with the background, mostly working on larger topographies and patterns first and then distorting them, looking for a balance and, as mentioned last week, the story. Here are a few samples of the iterative process:

This project is something nice to look forward to each night. I’m making these more complicated than they “need” to be with multiple figures or body positions, but it’s my project, so the only rules are my own. I’m enjoying it. Next week, I’ll be looking for more fluidity in the contours.

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Andy Web: Artist by Maree Coote

Images from Andy Web: Artist

Andy Webb: Artist by Maree Coote is a sweet story about a spider named Andy who likes to draw. Andy lives in the National Gallery. At night, Andy studies the gallery paintings and draws. This is a classic “learn from the masters” approach. Andy wants to be an artist, but color is a challenge. His drawings are in “web,” which is colorless (shown in the book as white).

The art in this book is fantastic. It is full of classic pieces of art that can be talked about, identified, and named, which is wonderful in terms of early exposure to art and art history. Andy draws beautiful string art all over these pieces of art. The layering of art on top of art is whimsical and beautiful and completely mesmerizing.

It is a lot of fun to see well-known pieces of art covered or extended or altered by Andy’s web art. What Andy really wants to do is add color. Ultimately, Andy comes up with a clever approach. On the very last page we get this summary statement, an important reminder for everyone: “Art is like a spiderweb, Andy realized. It all depends on how you look at it.”

There is a list of artists in the back of Andy‘s favorite artists. The list includes Henry Rousseau, Johannes Vermeer, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Frida Kahlo, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Piet Mondrian, and others.

Especially given that I have been working with contours, I found this to be a really charming book.

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Postcard Prompt 6

Keeping things whimsical for all of us, the March prompt is about contours.

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Weekly Bits and Pieces

Prompts for Illustrate Your Week - Week 11 (2025)

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Made It?

Thank you for reading along! I always enjoy your comments and invite you to chime in. Let me know what stands out for you, what you think after reading, or where we connect.

Thank you to those who commented last week about footnotes. I appreciate your words. It sounds like lots of people hide out in the footnotes and some readers enjoy them as a bit of a secret space in the margins. Within the space available, it’s a comfort zone. I’m glad to know a few of you are here for the detour.

Is there a gate you need to open or pass through? Is there a hinge that needs oil?

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Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

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1. I opened the gates one night this week, overwhelmed by beginning to sort through folders and folders of old files I found tucked in a set of folders inside of folders, a set of nesting dolls covered in words and notes, the graffiti of years.

I opened the gate, really there is just one, a star-and-moon carving at the top, a door of sorts, split in half so that only the bottom swings free. The wood is stained with lichen, an unnatural yellow green, a streak of chartreuse that speaks of age and disuse. The latch has rusted.

The handle would creak if one reached for it. I’m not sure if it would turn or not. I’m not sure if the two steps leading to the gate would hold weight. My guess is they, too, have rotted.

There is a real gate. I’m not sure when I last looked at the gate.

“Are we sucking at this?” I asked this week, peering into the fridge.
(Deep down, I think the answer is yes.)

I opened the gate, but not really. I imagine it this way.

It could be a window or a door, but I opened the gate. This might be a gate into a backyard, or it might be a gate tucked in trees, a portal into a secret garden, a gate flattened in a black and white photo, almost invisible, but choosing gate and not window or door stems not from the forest but from a floodgate, the gate that holds in the words, the gate that holds back lost time.

Lulled by the music, a layering of sound drifting through time, a siren’s call drifting from deep within the trees, I opened the gate, just a little. I wasn’t walking in. I was letting in, or letting out, and it feels like I should say that a graveyard of characters walked in, a circus act of monsters drawn from some Lynda Barry exercise or pulled from My Favorite Thing is Monsters.

But there were no monsters. There was weight. There was noise. There was the crushing weight of the task, of futility, of layering, and of forgetting. There was an explosion of disconnected light shooting in a thousand directions, coalescing in midair, the connectors appearing, snapping into place, a web of existence, a web of thought, the weeping willow in the sky.

I sat looking at the palimpsest, knowing that it, alone, is the only story I have ever had. It is a story that continues to sprawl and spiral, looping, bridging gaps, and peeling papers. We each have this story, this unfolding of time.

2. A headache had a lot to do with the tenor of the week. But before and after work each day, I spent a lot of time in folders and files from twenty years ago. I wrote a long-winded explanation of what I’m doing and why. It’s full of mattresses and backups and fear and forgetting. It’s an archaeological dig that continues to expand, new tunnels opening like an old console game. I’m looking for dragons, gathering gems along the way, and training my eyes to see in the dark. I keep following the path, trying to remember adages about how to get out of a maze, but deep down, I know there is no exit, nothing to win. This is simply a quest that quiets the fear that nothing really matters.

3. “On my mind this week, the FDIC, butter sparking in the microwave, personal ethics, rejection, being unfriendable, learning in public, and being lost.”

One of those was a realization as I weaved my way around the children’s playground one night, hoping to snap a few photos for my contours project after picking up a prescription, milk, and bread. I headed back to my car, turned on the microphone to make some notes, and cried. Parking lots are good for such things.

4. Tharp’s quote is excerpted from a piece called “Connect the Dots: Mapping the Seafloor and Discovering the Mid-ocean Ridge,” originally published in Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia: Twelve Perspectives on the First Fifty Years 1949-1999.

Marie Tharp. Image: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (Columbia University) and the estate of Marie Tharp

See also: art projects based on Tharp’s work.