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.

In the town where I live in Mexico, most of the stores are about the size of a walk-in closet. La tiendita de la esquina (also known as the corner store) and la papelería (a “stationary” but oh-so-much-more store) are the heart and soul of a Mexican neighborhood. In my neighborhood alone, I count eight tienditas within a three block radius. Each one has it’s own flavor.

I fell in love with Mexico on my first trip in 1989. I was on my honeymoon and travelled around by bus for a month with my new husband. Merida, in the Yucatan was our first stop and when we arrived, it was a blissful sensorial shock to my system. The language fell melodious into my ears. The smells flowed through and out my pores. The vivid color threatened to burst my retinas. All of the “foreignness” intrigued me and I absorbed it like my sweat-soaked tank top in the jungle of Quintana Roo.

There are four artist studios, that are separate from the main building. I had what I decided was the best one, as it was off by itself next to the chickens with a wall of windows for light and a great view.