Detour

Hello Friend!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Sometimes when I’m between projects, I feel there’s not a lot to say. Yet, those in-between places are where things can get interesting. I find that seeing others’ processes and works-in-progress can be at least as engaging as looking at finished works. A finished work invites appreciation, questions, self-examination; but a work-in-progress engages my brain on a different level of wonder, filling in blanks, and seeking information. I’d be first through the door in a gallery full of half-finished works!

For a few months my work has been intentionally less focused. I’ve filled sketchbook pages with fast, loose sketches: bits from road-tripping, nature-journaling and landscape. I took a brilliant oil painting workshop with this local artist, which has spurred new ideas and experiments-in-progress. And, I’ve been attending life-drawing sessions once again. Like oils, this is something I took a years-long hiatus from, but one session was enough to remind me how much I missed it. The process itself feels like gathering information. It’s hard to deem something complete when you are sketching in intervals between two and twenty minutes, but those drawings have a kind of energy and dynamism different from sustained work. The experience is completely in the moment: a kind of moving meditation.

It’s funny that the title of my May 2025 exhibit was Roadside/Wayside, in that it feels like since that time, I’ve been picking up threads of experience and inspiration not only along the roadsides: nature trails, country roads, highways, galleries & studios, antique & thrift shops, but also from projects previously left by the wayside because…life happens.

This can be the tricky part with art: you don’t always know where it’s going, or that it won’t lead to a dead end. Even workshops with a clear outcome only take us so far before we have to decide how to carry on alone.

What I can say is that it’s been playful, refreshing, and expansive. I leave you with a collage of just a few of these places (literal and figurative) where the road has taken me the past months: