November 25, 2025

On November 22, 2025 I spent the day selling my art at a juried artisan/craftsman festival because my wise and beautiful daughter convinced me to send in an application. When I was notified about my acceptance into the festival, I felt happy and nervous.

Creating my art is easy because creating is solitary. I am alone in my studio when I shape my stories, my vision, with paint. Creating is safe. Putting my art out into the world to sell is hard because selling is gregarious. It invites the public to peruse and ultimately judge my art and therefore my vision. Selling is unnerving. Even more unnerving is selling my art at an event where my interaction with the public is expected and necessary. I much prefer to drop my art off at a gallery or shop and leave the selling and interacting to someone else.

I am thankful to say that my day spent at the festival, with my daughter’s help and support, was very satisfying. Not only did I sell many, many paintings, but I met and had meaningful interactions with a variety of people. Their remarks and insights enriched me. I felt validated as an artist, brought home a renewed sense of vitality for creating, and an overflowing gratitude for those who understood and even shared my artistic vision.

I can say with conviction that my experiences on November 22, 2025 helped me cultivate gratitude for my daughter, the strangers I met, my ability to create art, and the knowledge that purpose and meaning can be found even in an uncertain and unnerving world. I find comfort in those thoughts and hope that during this season of Thanksgiving they bring comfort to you, too.

October 28, 2025

Taking one photo per day, of a detail or a moment in my everyday life and surroundings, has become one of my rituals. It creates a brief mental or emotional pause for me and grounds me. My life’s ordinary trimmings seem special in the collected photos. They are starting to tell a story, not just about what I gather around me and value, but also about me.

The photo attached to this journal entry was taken in my studio. I was interrupted while reading the book,This is Home: the Art of Simple Living, by Natalie Walton, and had to put my book down. When I returned I noticed how appealing it was, the unintentional still life created by my humble materials and took a photo to capture the vignette.

What I appreciate about this photo is its calm. There is no drama as one moment pauses and another is promised. The book is open and waits for someone to settle in and continue reading. That someone is me.

September 10, 2025

Recently, I started taking one photograph each day, of something in my home environment, to chronicle otherwise forgotten moments. I print a copy of the photo and paste it into a journal with the date the photo was taken and (if necessary) a title. It is remarkable how much beauty exists in ordinary things; and how much creative inspiration, for writing and painting, this beauty provides. The first photograph I took was of our small dog, Bear. I used that photo to complete the painting in this post.

After I’d started this project, I read the following in the Camont Journals by Kate Hills: “Finding one’s voice as a writer, an artist, a photographer, or any other human is less an exercise in filling notebooks and journals, but more about living each day fully and as it presents itself—fractured, in pieces, broken by shards of light that are the glory moments remembered forever”.

This quote from Kate describes the essence of my effort: keeping moments of ordinary glory, from my ordinary life, remembered; perhaps not forever, but at least for a time. Hence the following poem:

Capture it early,
when the sun climbs in the East,
one photo every day
saving one moment,
otherwise unnoticed,
but now the most important thing,
an unforgotten intention
to preserve time.

August 13, 2025

Riding thermals,
they climb on sunburned air,
gain altitude, circling,
on motionless wings,
weightless,
carried high
amidst palm fronds drooping
in heat so thick
I can see it
rising below the gulls
lifting their light bodies up to the blue sky,
even as I feel it stealing my breath and
pressing me down to the ground.

July 1, 2025

Yellow is a primary color

worn by
sunflowers,
a halo of petals
turning to the sky,

worn by
roses,
one thorny Julia Child
with show-stopping buttery beauty,

worn by
lemons,
as scent and flavor
in rind and pulp,

worn by
summer,
alive with light and heat
and creation’s survival.

Yellow,
one brilliant color,
purple’s complement and an
agreeable companion to red and blue.

May 27, 2025

Weathered,
edges softened,
floors worn smooth inside,
soft, sugar-white sand outside,
all perfectly imperfect.
Baskets
and bowls
hold seaglass
shells and stones,
bounty from barefoot beach walks.
Waves
wash ashore,
gulls caw, float
pale-grey and white in silhouette,
against the cerulean sky.
Breezes,
fill white sails,
float the spicy-sweet scent
of magenta beach roses
into cool shadowed rooms.
Grasses,
sea oats and spartina
bleach in the sun,
flowers bloom
in bright summer colors.
Slowly,
time passes,
the dog asleep on the porch,
with me beside her,
one hand stroking her soft coat.
Together,
we share this moment
quietly, in a shack on the beach,
where horizon meets sea and sea meets shore,
and living ebbs and flows with the tides.

April 9, 2025

I’ve read, When Women Were Birds, by Terry Tempest Williams, several times. In the book she tells how she inherited her mother’s journals and found every page in every journal blank. To me, that emptiness speaks volumes. One reading of the book, several years ago, compelled me to create the posted painting; but I found no words to go with the painting until now.

Where do they come from, the stories,
and before them the words,
that tell us how to live
in an uncertain world?

Do they lie fallow
in ancestral myths
rumbling in hearts
pulsing in minds
waiting for the quieted throat
to find voice?

Are they buried
in ancestral memories
darkened, silent,
waiting for light
to strengthen and grow,
to find life?

Where do they come from, the stories
and before them the words
that tell us how to live
in an uncertain world?

I say:
they come from us
blank pages are waiting

March 12, 2025

It was a car stopping sight. The field, mainly low green grass; the distant sky a surround of pink and blue; and near the road a small section of weathered wattle fencing supporting a small, vibrant patch of sunflowers, swaying gold, orange and buttery yellow; their heads too heavy to hold still, in the light summer breeze. Was this really just a country road, somewhere in rural Georgia, or had I time traveled to the South of France?

I left the car and walked nearer to the sunflowers; silence broken only by the occasional bird song and the crunch of gravel beneath my feet. I was tempted to touch the smooth leaves, prickly centers and stems. Tempted to cut and gather the flowers into a bouquet, to take home with me and hold captive in a clear vase filled with cool water. Instead, I admired this burst of surprising beauty in an otherwise unassuming pastoral setting and left the sunflowers rooted in the earth so they might share their simple splendor with other wanderers.

February 12, 2025

A short month, halfway between
winter solstice and spring equinox,
this month of hearts and flowers
hints of verdant spring,
promises an end to mousy winter.
Birds chirp,
sun warms,
no ice on water now,
no frost to kill delicate buds.
Day lengthens,
opens and closes with vibrant skies.
Night shortens,
heaven glows with planets and stars.
In February
this short month, halfway between
winter solstice and spring equinox,
the year is young, almost new,
and optimism abides.

January 15, 2025

This essay came about when I could not find the time to rework the painting linked to the essay. All I wanted to do was add more negative space by covering over a portion of the marsh in the right bottom corner of the canvas. Yet “all I wanted to do” seemed impossible because other aspects of life kept interfering. My life, just like my painting, needed more negative space. I gave the painting what it needed; and resolved to do the same to my life.

Negative space is not, as it sounds, gloomy and pessimistic. In art, negative space is very positive, defining subjects and providing visual balance. Technically negative space is empty space but empty, as used here, does not mean insignificant or unimportant. Negative space unifies a composition’s disparate parts and helps the viewer make sense of the composition. The viewer’s eyes find a place to rest in negative space.

I experience the pleasure of negative space every year when I clear away holiday decorations. When the tangible is removed, I am greeted with a new view and my home seems more spacious and restful. Air and lightness fill what is otherwise an empty, but significant, space.

This year I plan to use the idea of negative space to define what is essential and find balance in my life. When the extraneous bits fall away, I won’t gain any more time, and I may even have to attend to some of the culled pieces at a later date, but in the immediate I’ll feel, and be able to breathe, easier. I’ll invite the air and lightness in and put away, even for a time, what feels out of place.

Maybe the artful concept of negative space will help me live more artfully this year; and maybe with perseverance, finding negative space in my life will become not a resolution for the new year, it will become a way of being in 2025.