The structure in our lives helps to ground us in between flights of what sometimes feel like out-of-body-experiences with beauty. In the creative process, structure is often consistent, while beauty ripples and flows — sometimes unbidden — merging the perfect pair.

In between breakthroughs of semi-brilliance in the studio, artists move between doubt and fear most of their lives. Like a drug, making art can take us on a magic carpet ride one minute and thrown overboard, gripping the fringes the next.

I began way too teenage-young stealing my sister’s Parliaments at fourteen and making myself power through coughs in the locked bathroom until I could smoothly get through a cigarette with the “cool” I was after. By the time I reached young adulthood, everyone I knew smoked.