Introducing Wildfolk

and the journey to being a "good enough" artist

I shot up in bed the other night, gasping for breath. Apparently, I mumbled something about dreaming I was coding, then laid back down. When my partner told me the next morning, I chuckled. Somehow, I never thought “coding” would make it on my nightmare list, but it has.

Building a website when you’re not a coder can do that to a person. But I’ll get to that in a moment.

It took me completely by surprise when, while writing the first draft of my manuscript these past ten months or so, I found myself pulled more toward drawing than writing. Since I was a child, I’ve been doing both — writing and drawing — yet writing has always taken center stage. I had never considered myself an “artist.” People (mostly kind adults) would tell me I was good at drawing, but these words never stuck. I wasn’t particularly critical of myself; it was more that it never occurred to me this was something I could be good enough at to assess myself critically.

At some point, I don’t recall when but before I reached adolescence, I stopped drawing entirely. And I didn’t think about it for years, until I picked up my pencils and began sketching here and there in my mid thirties. The pandemic hit and, desperate to make money wherever I could, I began offering my services to friends and family to make pet portraits. When I tired of that, the pencils were stashed away again, without much thought.

Moving across the country inspired me to begin a nature journal. Little sketches of plants, animals and insects I encountered for the first time emerged on the page. To my surprise, I enjoyed this more than any other drawings I’d done. But it wasn’t until I moved to Brooklyn and began sketching pigeons, often in costumes, that a shift began to take place, ever so slowly. My partner kept softly encouraging me to do something with them. Or at least, whispering that I was good enough to do this, if I wanted to.

A progression of art

How do you enter an arena saturated with exquisitely talented artists? I wondered. Especially when you don’t view yourself as an artist. I felt myself curling up in shy uncertainty at the thought.

But the thought wouldn’t stay curled up with me. It wanted to stretch out. It came knocking most days, and I’d pick up my sketchbook in response. The more I answered, the more I realized, this was joyful. Nurturing to my spirit.

And so, when I was supposed to be writing, many days, I’d find myself drawing instead. This deeply unsettled me for a number of reasons, one of them being, I WAS A WRITER, DAMMIT. And also, would the words ever come back? Would I be able to finish this book? Was it possible, after all, to be more than one thing?

I’ve come out as nonbinary — not fitting in either the male or female category — so I knew, yes. It’s quite possible (and very likely) to be more than one thing, in multitudinous ways.

Quietly, I began working on something new, alongside my manuscript (which I did finish, praise the pigeons). Even as the voices around me and within me seemed skeptical, I tried to lean into my partner’s voice. The voice that believed in me as an artist.

For the past six months or so, I’ve been creating designs. Researching how to start a small creative arts business in New York. Finding production companies, ordering samples, placing my first order of inventory. Researching packaging and shipping and website builder platforms and domains. I finally picked a business name and registered it, and then, it felt real.

But building the actual website, y’all. That’s been brutal. My partner, who’s an actual coder (or was, before AI, whomp whomp), has tried to explain to me for years that the simple functions we see on a webpage don’t convey the amount of work that went into creating them behind the scenes. I get it now.

I’ve created this simple website for my shop over many, many exasperating hours (and in full, begrudging transparency, with the much-needed assistance of a chatbot helping me write code, because I’m still not a coder). My inner critic looks at this website and cringes, wondering how all those hours of work still failed to get it to look the way I’d hoped. But as with many things, this, too, needs to be a practice of allowing something to be good enough.

So here I am, launching my humble, good-enough shop. I want to introduce you to Wildfolk, an expression of playful whimsy and love for my other-than-human kin in visual form.

https://wildfolk.shop

I’m still working on embracing myself as an artist, but I’ve come a long, long way. And maybe that, too, is good enough.

I hope you can offer yourselves that good enough, too. Who knows what else you might be…

Stay ever curious,

Phoenix