Day 13. Memory
“Memory” 6×6, oil on canvas, framed I wasn’t sure how to finish my painting today, and when I started adding little swipes of paint in rows, it felt like I was counting, like a person lost in the wild marking the days by carving lines into the trunk of a tree Today I am invoking […]
Day 12. Contrast
“Asking to be Seen” 6×6, oil on canvas, framed I think about color a lot– when I’m cooking, getting dressed, taking a walk, even when I’m trying to solve a problem. When I teach painting, I always start with the color wheel because it holds simple truths most of us never really learn. The colors […]
Day 11. Patience
“Patience” 10×10, oil on canvas, framed 31 in 31 is always an exercise in patience. I want so much to jump ahead, to sing the song without having to go through all the verses. Patience is visiting today in the form of a little bird landing on a relaxed, reclining figure not so much playing […]
Day 10. Witness
“Witness” 6×6, oil on canvas, framed. Kelly Cherry wrote a poem called “Advice to a Friend who Paints” that I read quite some time ago. This morning that title kept simmering to the surface of my mind, and, since I am wary of unsolicited advice and since I am in fact a person who paints, […]
Day 9. Change
“Spinning my Wheels” 8×8, oil on canvas, framed. I had planned for today’s piece to be about gratitude but what kept coming up was gratitude for this tension between change and constancy. So I went with that. Change The potter’s wheel spins 240 revolutions per minute, constant from a lump of clay you form an […]
Day 8. Hope
“Hope” 6×6, oil on panel, framed. I have forever loved Emily Dickinson’s poem “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” and returned to it time and time again especially in my decade + of painting birds. What I notice most is how my birds have changed over the years, and with them, perhaps, my notion of […]
Day 7. Inspiration
“Waiting for Inspiration” 8×8, oil on canvas, framed. There is a nervousness to every 31 in 31. Certainly the inspiration will dry up eventually? Surely the words won’t always come. And then what? I wonder if sometimes the business of my life– routine doctor checkups and soccer games and chopping onions and tending to an […]
Day 6. Freedom
“Unencumbered” 8×10, oil on canvas, framed. This painting took lots of different twists and turns in a dance not unsimilar to the one depicted in its final iteration. Whereas sometimes I know exactly what I want to work on in a painting session, today’s was all about just seeing what would happen. How freeing it […]
Day 5. Joy
“Out of the Blue” 6×6, oil on wood panel, framed. My morning meditation today was on Joy, her capriciousness, her constant surprise, her inability to be invoked or beckoned as though her very nature is to arrive when not expected. In cleaning up my work space recently, I stumbled upon an unopened jar of cold […]