Beauty is everywhere.  Deciding what to capture on paper or board or canvas is the happy decision of every painting experience.

The only solution for me is to simply paint what I love. To notice what makes my heart beat a tiny bit faster, to feel the leap of knowing when I look at the shifting clouds or pick up a green and golden pear or a branch of wild berries.  There is a feeling.  An emotional pulse that I wish I could describe but I can’t.  I simply know what I love to look at and I know what I want to paint.  

​How lucky is that?

Landscapes

Still Life

Sweet Creatures

What have I learned through Painting...

I’ve been looking longingly out windows my whole life.  My earliest memories of elementary school are sitting at a cramped wooden desk filled with unorganized papers, knowing I hadn’t done the homework right the night before and that I’d be called on in a minute and wouldn’t know what the answer was but, instead of focusing on my school work,

​I looked out the window to  the crooked row of sparrows sitting on the telephone line that ran from the school to the house next door.  I couldn’t stop looking at them.  The clouds moved slowly in the background, suddenly and silently the birds one by one lifted up and flew away as if it was a practiced routine. I was called on.  I didn’t know the answer.  I didn’t really care.
Shortly after I started painting a friend asked me what I had learned that I didn’t know before.  

“I’ve learned to see”, I told him. Little did I know that the first flush of painting and my initial seeing was my gentle introduction to the painting experience.  

Learning to see, I’ve come to understand, means stopping the noise in my head and ignoring the distractions all around me; it means looking at the pear or clouds or sparrow and really seeing them for what they are right then, in that moment. It means noticing the delicate bruise on the side of the pear, the complicated shadows and colors in the clouds and the tiny dusting of feathers poking out from under the sparrow’s tail.

​It means recognizing the simple beauty in each thing I paint. Being careful to acknowledge the complexity of each creature, the spareness of each landscape. And then feeling free to create my vision of them. To interpret the energy, space, structures I am seeing and feeling. Somehow between my first look and the final smear of oil on canvas a little magic happens.  

​But only if I see what I’m painting…only if I respect, appreciate, honor and then see what is before me.  
original art in oils and watercolors