Notes from the Ladybug Studio
A year-end reflection on making time to create
Exactly two years ago, I went to a remote artist retreat in upstate New York for the final week of the year. I dug up this short piece I wrote while I was there.
On December 26, 2023, I arrived at Millay Arts for my first-ever artist residency. My living quarters and my own light-filled studio are in a barn at the foot of the Berkshires.
The air was gray, misty, and sleepy from post-Christmas celebrations when I hauled my four packed bags over to Penn Station from Brooklyn. My Amtrak train seemed to move through an opaque white cloud as we chugged up along the Hudson. But once my bags and I strapped into my chatty cabby’s ride, the sun broke out. I didn’t know what to expect on this journey, but I felt my tensions ease from my driver’s conversation and the view of clear blue skies through the bare winter trees.
Late-night online searching for some sort of escape led to my discovery of Millay Arts, which offers a quiet, peaceful winter retreat where artists can apply for time to create and reflect. While juggling my full-time job at the gallery, other freelance obligations, and recent health issues, I’d been frustrated with finding less and less time to devote to my illustrations. Getting into a headspace where I could draw and write freely had begun to feel harder to reach. Email threads and to-do lists followed me everywhere. If I didn’t get this week to myself, it meant I was prioritizing everyone and everything over me.
So when Calliope led me to the barn and casually opened the door to the spacious studio that would be mine for the week, I was emotional. After such a tough year, this was exactly what I needed.
I wrote down observations that first afternoon in the barn:
When I glance out of the window, all I see are treetops and sky.
I count
seveneight ladybugs currently—crawling on the windows of the studio. One keeps flying off and onto the windowpane, trying to find an opening. I always wonder how they got in if they can’t get out.
The presence of the ladybugs is impossible to ignore. This is their studio.
On December 27, my first full day at Millay, I woke up in the barn and climbed a flight of stairs to the big studio with my name on the door. I sat at one of the two desks and took in the quiet. Air particles floated in the beams of sunlight. I opened my laptop and the first page of my sketchbook, but I didn’t know what to do. Had no idea where to begin.
Gazing around the room, I wondered if the ladybugs held up some kind of mirror. Am I also slamming up against the window, unable to figure out how to get to where I want to be?
When I turned back to the materials I’d schlepped up here, my eye caught my new gouache paints. I knew it was time to experiment with them.
I made a sign that reads Ladybugs Live Here, which I later taped on the wall. I painted eight of them around the letters in their varying shades of red and orange (my favorite colors).
To recreate the ladybugs, I had to get down on the floor to peer closely at their tiny bodies—some dead, some alive and just sleeping, I learned—to LOOK at their unique spot patterns and colors.
Some have big, dark, chunky spots, like Dalmatians.
Some have a light orange color and the faintest spots you can barely distinguish.
On all of the ladybugs, the spots on each wing are perfectly symmetrical to the other.
They rest wherever they please on the floor—wings splayed open or tucked together—whether it’s right under my chair or blending in among the burgundy fibers on the rug. I must step gingerly around them so I don’t crush anyone with my big slippered feet.
Here, I spend entire days uninterrupted in the barn. I try not to think ahead about my plans back home when I return on the first of the new year. It is time consumed quietly painting, drawing, and writing between my two desks near the window light, with my tiny, curious companions. This is the Ladybug Studio.
In many ways, this tension between daily life and the desire to return to my creative practice is at the heart of a late bloomer’s desk, a theme I’ve explored throughout the year.
I didn’t leave Millay Arts with much finished work so much as a recalibrated sense of attention—toward small things, toward time, toward myself. Back home, that way of working proved harder to sustain. My schedule filled up and life moved quickly, as it always does. But the week there showed me that it was possible.
At the close of another year, two years later, I reread this and feel proud for having given that time to myself at all. The Ladybug Studio was a gift. I can’t always protect that kind of peace in daily life, but I can try to make room for it.
We can all honor ourselves by starting again.
The ladybug metaphor working on multiple levels here is realy well done. The image of them pressing against the glass feels like such a precise capture of that creative frustration when life crowds out making space for work. I've had similar moments where stepping away completley (even just for a few days) recalibrates what's actually possible versus what just feels impossible because everything else is so loud. The detail about observing their spot patterns to paint them accurately is a nice touch too, it shows how slowing down changes what you notice. Hope you've been able to carry some of that energy forward.