Astrogeology tour / January 10, 2024 by Laura J. Lawson

I had the privilege of joining Dr. Kirby Runyon on a tour of space, right here on Earth. His astronaut geology training brought us to several geologic sites that are almost identical to what an astronaut would find on the moon, Mars, Venus, Io, Titan, and other worlds.

Together with another space enthusiast, we visited the New Mexico Museum of Space History, Carrizozo lava flow, White Sands National Park, Kilbourne Hole, and Aden Crater.

The New Mexico Museum of Space History was a great place to start. We were in the company of real rockets and astronaut equipment, and learned how astronauts trained for their missions at the sites we were about to visit.

Next was Carrizozo lava flow, which we visited through the Valley of Fires recreation area. This 40 mile expanse of lava poured from Little Black peak (not pictured), estimated around 5000 years ago. Kirby taught us to identify different formations in the basaltic rock, and we enjoyed hopping off the trail to piece together how the lava moved and hardened. Except for the vegetation, this sort of landscape is easy to find on other volcanic planets.

Our last stop of Day 1 was White Sands National Park. This dunefield of sparkling gypsum crystals is the largest of its kind on earth, and like nearby Carrizozo lava flow, can be seen from space. This was a truly surreal experience for me—coming from the flat prairie of Dallas, I spent the whole day snapping photos of anything larger than a hill. The whiteness of the sand intensified the colors of the sky in a way that my camera doesn’t capture, and the tops of the dunes glittered as the sun went down. We hiked across a few dunes for a moment of solitude, and enjoyed the eerie quiet and stillness.

The first stop of Day 2 was Kilbourne Hole, where Apollo astronauts were trained between 1969 and 1971. Kilbourne is a maar: tens of thousands of years ago, rising magma encountered groundwater in the crust, resulting in an explosion from all the vapor pressure. This blew apart the surface and ejected rocks from deeper underground. Among all the black basalt are bits of pyroxene and green olivine. I found it amazing to learn that this pale blue dot has a green heart under the surface.

Our final stop was Aden Crater. Aden Crater is a shield volcano, with rocky remains of what once were lakes of lava. This was a more substantial hike, from the dirt road up to the ridge, but in my imagination it was the most Martian experience. The dusty soil on the outskirts reminded me so much of the Red Planet, and it felt like the three of us were alone in the world on our trek from the lander. We carefully ambled up and down precarious slopes to follow lava tubes and hunt for vents. In my mind, I lived my dream of being off-planet.

Bonus pictures: if you know me, you know I love animals. The drive to Aden Crater involved going through pasture gates, and we had a funny encounter surrounded by cows. My hotel in El Paso had these two very well cared for cats living in the garden.

I sincerely thank Kirby Runyon for organizing such a wonderful experience, with the right amount of education and fun. Thank you to Jonathan Stroud for being great company, and special thanks to Ken Bowdon for connecting me to Kirby and making this trip possible.

Touching / February 6, 2021 by Laura J. Lawson

I’ve gone a year without getting sick and I remember in horror the city where I touched everything. So much pushing and grasping of tickets and gates and latches and buzzers and chairs and rails and doors. Two bisous for every acquaintance—and four for your dad—and my glasses collide with all of them. Every step is a chance encounter with gum and cigarettes: wet, white, spat-out vices. Contents of pockets are leaked into chairs. We could be suffocated by the intimations of mouths and hands. Ça me dégoûte; ça me plaît.

Opposition / October 5, 2020 by Laura J. Lawson

Mars 2461, acrylic ink and marker on polypropylene, 2019 — *Mars 2461*, acrylic ink and marker on polypropylene, 2019

During a tired Sunday doomscroll, an inconspicuous piece of information peeked out from between life-and-death tweets. As it does roughly every two years, Mars will be in opposition on Tuesday. Opposition is the alignment of the Sun, Earth, and Mars. If you’re standing on Earth (and I won’t assume you are), the Sun and Mars are in opposite positions. Tuesday’s opposition brings Mars a mere 62.07 million kilometers from Earth.

I am the dork who shares unsolicited fun facts about space. I’ve witnessed many oppositions; this is just another, right on schedule. Since the last opposition, however, I have tried to understand Mars more intimately. I have traced its geologic features hundreds of times. My studio table is stained with red oxides and icy whites. I enjoy the effort, but I must concede that this is a place that is wholly unknowable to me. It will not be my boot pressing footprints into the surface. I will not be piloting across its terrain in a suit engineered to distribute and hold dear my every breath. I am stuck here.

I am stuck here: a fenced-in United Statesian, doomscrolling on a Sunday, wondering which invisible particles or powers will hurt me first.

Conversely, I am stuck here. I can step outside right now without sweating or shivering. My senses and abilities come from generations of adaptation. I get to smudge rust-colored pigments into images, just like my ancestors, to pass knowledge beyond the life of my body.

I am stuck, but I will step blindly into the night and look for that familiar stranger, staring until my light-addled eyes pick up that soft unblinking blush, a neighborly sixty-two million kilometers away.

J. / June 28, 2019 by Laura J. Lawson

The middle initial. Is it pompous? Does it give a melodic number of syllables? Is it better for SEO? Sure. That’s not why I use mine.

Maybe you’ve worked with me before, and I had to politely insist that my J. is included in my name when printed. Here is my explanation.

My name is Laura¹ Jane² Lawson³.

¹Laura, after a close friend of my mother.
²Jane, after Dorothy Jane Lawson, my grandmother.
³Lawson, my father’s last name.

Dorothy Jane Broyles was born on July 19th, 1925 in Callis, Texas, which was 25 miles northeast of McKinney in Collin County. She married my grandfather, Henry Lawson, at age 16. Henry fought in Europe during World War II, and had a long career as a Methodist minister. Together they had three sons, the youngest of which is my father.

Dorothy had many roles: a preacher’s wife, a homemaker, a farmer, a saint (for raising those three boys), a skilled quilter, and generally “artistic.” She took some art classes and made artworks, but I am unsure that she or anyone else definitively called her an Artist, full stop, no buts. Reader, she was.

The Garden of Eden in oil pastel.

Portrait in watercolor.

We think this may have been a self portrait, but it bears an eerie resemblance to my sister.

Portrait in oil paint.

Still life in pen and ink.

[These photos are framed under glass, and were taken with a cell phone camera as-is on the wall. I’ll photograph them professionally one day!]

As far as I could tell, she enjoyed her life as it was with no complaints, and she was a wonderful grandmother to me. Even though she was all smiles in my lifetime, I can’t speak for her. If I were a young wife and mother in the 1940s, I would probably be frustrated, scared, angry, tired, and never quite content. It is easy for homemaking to overwhelm even one drawing project.

While there is still much to fight for when it comes to equal rights, I am so relieved to have the freedom to make the choices I have made in my life so far. I’m an artist, a college professor, and an unmarried mother of two cats. Though I have no human children, I am proud that her name and creative legacy continue with my brilliant and wonderful niece, Emma Jane.

Dorothy worked hard in raising her family, tending to farms and livestock, and carving out time for quilts and paintings. I’m proud to have her name, and I hope that by using that name professionally, I can honor her work as an artist.

On defining an artist / March 4, 2019 by Laura J. Lawson

This has shown up in my social media a few times during the past several weeks:

The comments are totally full of stories about people being afraid to call themselves an artist to other people until they’ve hit a certain milestone.

Just as I sat down to write out my own struggles with artist-identity, I was kindly invited by The Cedars Union to join a panel discussion on this very topic. (Since this event has passed, this post has been edited.) Erica Felicella moderated the discussion between Jeremy Biggers, Melissa Turner Drumm, Hatziel Flores, Riley Holloway, and me.

Here are some pieces from my story.

I have always been a bit of a Hermione Granger. I was good at school, and I have spent years taking comfort and pride in the fact that my GPA was a good reflection of the things I know. I did not major in art in college, and because of that I desperately needed some sort of academic validation when my art career chose me. (The wand chooses the wizard, Mr. Potter, and these references are never going away.) My MFA did so much for me in terms of becoming a better artist and actually feeling like one.

This is not a required path to become an artist. I look up to many artists who have no MFA, BFA, or formal art education. What matters is a dedication to one’s practice, and an eagerness to learn from peers and mentors, with or without an expensive document and set of robes.

The really magical bit was how I accepted my path in the first place. I studied abroad in Paris, where I took several art history courses, despite being a Psychology major. Out of all the unsmiling European ID photos I had to take, one in particular changed my life: an unlimited student pass for the Musée du Louvre.

Some of Madame Mandel’s classes met in a little classroom with tiny desks and a noisy projector, but most of the time we gazed upon the topics of her lectures in the flesh, at the Louvre. We would make it through two or three petits galeries in three hours, and after class I would stay. On days off, I returned. On weekends, I went back. Even when rooms were thick with tourists and noise, I wedged myself onto a bench, spellbound. I knew that somehow, I had to be a part of this.

Jardin de Luxembourg, 2009. These are not my flowers.

There were many times between then and now where being an artist was so hard, I thought it impossible. I worked, I looked for better jobs, and I made terrible paintings in tiny apartments. Even when I thought my work was unshowable, I knew I had to keep making it. To give up art would be like giving up both lungs. Maybe I wasn’t a great artist, but I couldn’t deny that I was one.

Fast forward to today. The number of works I deem fit for consumption is exponentially greater. Rejections roll off my back and motivate me to increase my proposals. I am comfortable in this difficult and competitive field because I have stopped treating it like a competition, and started treating it like what it is: humanity’s creation of culture.

My peers at The Cedars Union have significantly different measuring sticks for what success looks like. If I used their stick, I would fall short, but if they used mine, so would they. We are finding success as artists by being true to ourselves on what we want and who we want to be.

Why I married my MFA / September 9, 2017 by Laura J. Lawson

I'm sure you've seen it by now: portraits, like mine here, of an overjoyed person batting their eyes at a degree, major project, or job offer. I don't know if it's overdone yet, but I'm in favor of it continuing. I've seen way too many friends and peers quietly accept their masters or doctorate to little fanfare; business as usual, no big deal.

It IS a big deal.

Getting any degree is a big deal. Particularly with grad school graduates, it seems to me that they finish, heave a sigh of relief, and resume taking care of the baby, the job, the housework, and life as usual, as if an MBA was on the grocery list.

Great accomplishments deserve celebration. Easy enough; just throw a party. Why marry it?

I do not always adore what I do. I have days where I wished I didn't have this stupid calling, days where I want to go out on the town or binge watch TV without the guilt of needing to get up and work. Acquaintances ask why my "hobby" takes up so much of my time, and I wonder if it's a fight worth picking. But I also have days where I am so grateful to have this thing that brings meaning and joy to my life, even when it's hard or thankless. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. I am and will always be an artist. That's my commitment.

I had a professor say that something like 90% of art graduates don't continue to make work after graduation. I looked for real statistics to cite, but I couldn't even decide what parameters to put on the data. Does it count if you show work without selling it? Does it count if you make work without showing it?

Regardless of what the numbers are for everybody else, I made my goals and remain devoted to them:

I will make art.
I will show my work.
I will be unafraid to push my work to new limits.

My MFA taught me these habits, which is why I wanted cement this relationship as a lifelong commitment.

A major criticism of appropriating marriage to celebrate a vocational milestone is that to some, it undermines the celebration of marriage between people, especially if I want to tie the knot later. No, I didn't have to call it a marriage. A lot of people getting these grad school photo shoots are simply emulating the over-the-top celebration without wearing their hot-glued wedding bands everywhere they go.

I've thought about this a lot, and this is where my personal priorities lie. I have an amazing partner, and he understands and supports my commitment to art, in part because he's equally committed to music. We labor at our day jobs, and help each other when laboring at our creative jobs. He and I are the kind of people who are not hurt by what art asks of us.

I hope to see others publicize their commitments to what they love, and not just who they love. It's a great opportunity to share how things work in your field, especially if it's different from what your family and friends are used to. What do you love?