Where to Begin?

Welcome to my first newsletter!

Greetings, this is Melanie Lan. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance we’ve met. But if you don’t know me, here’s a quick intro: I’m an artist based in NYC, I teach watercolor painting, and am the workshop director at Case for Making. I started this newsletter as a way to organize my inner world and share what lights my spark.

"What is this?”

Constellations is a monthly newsletter about my creative process. It’s my own meaning-making space, and a place for me to be authentic and real. I am a private person by nature, so this is also an experiment on being more open, generous, and courageous.

“Why is it called Constellations?”

I have struggled many times in both my art practice and in life to hold onto what feels bright and meaningful to me. In those dark nights of the soul, I’ve had to re-discover, over and over again, where the light shines, and how to map it out so that I can find my way back more easily when all feels lost. In sharing this newsletter, I hope others may find navigating by their own starlight a little easier.

20 x 26 cm, watercolor, January 2024

I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t always had a whole lot of faith in myself. Due to some combination of nature, nurture, and that mysterious third element of the cards we’re dealt, I’ve experienced a lot of self doubt. I am 35 now and have chosen my path years ago, but there have been multiple times where I’ve looked back wondering if I’ve made some terrible mistake.

My mother firmly believes that I’m doing life all wrong, and never misses a beat when it comes to reminding me so. Bless her. Recently she texted me: “It’s still not too late to become a pharmacist,” followed by job listings at Amazon, then a TikTok of a monstera plant that was actually a cake¹.

Keep in mind that I am gainfully employed, and I enjoy what I do. There is zero part of me that wants to be a pharmacist, and even less to work for Amazon. No shade to people in those professions, but that’s not what lights me up.

During the month of January I spent Thursday evenings taking the online course Living Courageously with Vanessa Zoltan. In one of the classes, Vanessa brought up how it can be so much harder to turn on the lights if you’re unfamiliar with a place. If you’ve never had to turn the lights on before, you might not know where the switches are. In the event of a power outage, you could be groping around in the dark for ages before you find the breaker box.

My hope is that Constellations will be a place to share the experience of becoming intimately familiar with my inner light switches, and a way to build structure around the interiority of learning about oneself.

Some fun things:

Tomorrow I will be fingerprinted for TSA pre-check. It’s been a few years since I had my fingerprints taken (the last time was in 2018 when it was required for working with people with developmental disabilities) so with this in mind, I’ve been looking at my own hands a lot; observing the tiny swirls at the tips of my fingers.

Loops, lines, and whorls. I see these patterns everywhere: chopping onions, the cross section of a cabbage, a rose in mid-bloom at the flower shop, hardwood floors, whirlpools of soapy water as the bathtub drains, photos of neighboring galaxies, and so forth. This is nothing new, but sometimes I forget, and it’s nice to be reminded that everything is connected.

abalone shells, topographic maps, mackerel skin, sand dunes in the wind

There is a strange pleasure in painting this pattern, repeatedly, in multiple iterations. The more I do it, the more I’m reminded of stuff I find fascinating. As I look forward to getting printed tomorrow, I asked myself “why do we even have fingerprints?” and it turns out they’re vital to the mechanism of human touch.

Fingerprints help us grip objects and feel their texture. They’re remarkably sensitive. Fingertips contain the highest concentration of nerve endings per square inch on the body, which might explain why it feels so good to make something with our hands. We’re built for it. It might also explain why scrolling on our phones or spending hours in front of a screen doesn’t feel quite as rewarding.

Which leads me to share the last feature of today’s newsletter: the BEST screen time I’ve had all week. For the past year I’ve been keeping an eye on the livestream Big Bear Valley Bald Eagle Nest Cam, and the eagles just laid two beautiful eggs. If successful, they will hatch the first week of March. I’ll be spending the next month watching these birds be birds. Highly recommend.

Jackie and Shadow in their beautiful nest.

Thanks for making it to the end!

The newsletters that follow probably won’t be so long, but I can’t say for sure, since I’ve never done this before.

This publication is free and I aim to keep it that way. It’s a labor of love to bring this to life, so if you enjoy it, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. You’ll have my sincerest gratitude and the delight of knowing you’re supporting my work as an artist.

Currently the intention is to publish once a month, at the end of each month, but this may grow and evolve into something more than that. Time will tell.

♥
Melanie

You are receiving this because you either subscribed or I signed you up because I love you. You can read Constellations in the format of your choice: as a newsletter in your inbox, on the webpage, or on the Substack app.

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1. I didn’t link to this because I cannot stand TikTok (it fragments and distorts my attention span) but the monstera plant cake will definitely come up if you Google it.