The Art & Poetry of Mary Coleman

Here is yesterday’s illustration. I’m pretty happy with it, was a tricky one, but I took it a step at a time and finished in about 2 hours. It’s really been a struggle to do these last few drawings.

My new deadline for finishing my book is December 18th. I would like to be done before the week of Christmas. I only have 5 illustrations left so I am going to work solidly from Sunday to Thursday. Then we are going out to eat to celebrate. Today and tomorrow are booked solid so I didn’t have time to do any drawing. This has been almost a year in the making. I started in late February last year.

Once I finish I’ll set the book aside for the rest of December and then in January I’ll start the arduous process of editing and preparing for self publishing. I’m going to promote it on Instagram as best I can and over the next year try to grow my audience on there to hopefully sell some copies. I will try to continue to get published in literary magazines throughout next year as well.

Next year I am going to be working on a new art series that has nothing to do with my poetry and harkens back to my oldest passion, medical history. I am going to be doing oil pastel portraits from a book of medical photographs. They are portraits of people from Japan with various kinds of tumors dated to around 1900. They sat in the basement of a Hiroshima hospital for around 100 years before being discovered and turned into a book. They survived the bomb and everything.

I presented my thesis in grad school. Previous to that I performed one line as the constellation Taurus in a school play about stars when I was 9 years old. So I don’t have much experience on the stage.

I was super prepared for my thesis presentation. I practiced for weeks and had a polished power point to go with it. Felt a little overkill when I realized on the day of most the other people were just winging it casually and sharing a few slides of their work.