For the month of May I’m offering 20% off paintings on my website…just use the promo code: MAY20. This painting, Sun over the forest, has just been added. The forest is a bounty, especially in May.

View up close in the gallery.

Sun over the forest does different things to it depending on the time of year. In summer, it can hardly penetrate the green ceiling of leaves—sending down funnels of dramatic light. In fall, it creates an otherworldly sense of change. In winter, it casts long blue shadows on snow. In spring, it pulls up the wildflowers out of the wet earth. They come in waves: Bloodroot, Trout Lily, Jack-in-the-pulpit, Wild Geranium, Marsh Marigold, Trillium, Lily of the Valley, St. James Wort…all of these and more appeared just this month.

Sun over the forest also does different things to you while you are in it.

I just added a batch of new paintings to my website, including this one, Inner workings. I’m offering 20% off all orders for the month…just use the promo code: MAY20.

View up close in the gallery.

This painting reflects the daily walks I’ve taken over these past couple of months as things change quickly here in Michigan. I have tried to become privy to the inner workings of as much as I can along the paths that I take. The pond comes to life as the patience of geese gives way to successfully hatched goslings. Larger fish appear from deeper waters and young painted turtles learn about a sunbath. Lichen and moss bloom like badges in the rain and suddenly the trees leaf out and bloom, too. The spring sky seems an indestructible blue.

I’ve got a box of artifacts collected during walks: rocks, pieces of fallen bark, feathers. It is the imprint of these magical things that give strength. It is the same as the horses that Dylan Thomas describes in his poem Fern Hill, dazed at the sheer beauty of it all:

So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

May in Michigan just might be the most beautiful time of year. To celebrate the yellow willow tree buds busting, the tiny (yet mighty) hepatica and bloodroot poking through last year’s leaves, and the newly hatched goslings at the pond this morning, I’m offering 20% all orders on my website for the month…just use the promo code: MAY20.

Even though in-person exhibits have come to a halt for now, I’m still painting every day. Watch for new paintings to be added to the site throughout the month. I’m also walking daily, writing, and re-reading favorite poets and learning the work of new ones. One poet who I came to learn about just last year is Wendell Berry. I’m not sure how I lived so long before reading his poems but I’m so glad I finally did. His poems express a fervent observation and reverence for nature—and how we as humans, can take comfort and rest in our place within it. This is the second half of his poem, The Finches, wishing them, and us, well as we emerge from the cold of April:

May the year warm them
soon. May they soon go

north with their singing
and the season follow.
May the bare sticks soon

live, and our minds go free
of the ground
into the shining of trees.

View the full gallery.

Next Wednesday, January 22, 6-8pm, I’ll be leading a workshop on poetry and painting. There are a few spots still available. It will take place in the gallery space at the Village Theater in Canton, where my solo exhibit, Transmutations, is currently hanging through the 29th.

The practice of combining words and painting is an endless puzzle. It requires observation and articulation and is something that I will never grow tired of: the moon in all of its phases, the tiniest mushroom on the forest floor, the city’s light on the river, the face of a friend, the memory of a hard time, the hope of a new idea. The poet Mary Oliver said, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

All 40 paintings are hung! Please stop in to the opening reception for my solo exhibit, Transmutations, this Thursday, January 9, 7-9pm at the Village Theater in Canton.

Each one has a title, a poem, an idea behind it. Each one was made over the course of about a year. Slowly, these paintings became a set, and the best way to describe them was Transmutations.  

One thing becomes another. This is the story of many things in nature: the river, the leaf, the rock, the star, the butterfly, the tree… It is also the story of people and ideas. Every day—every moment—changes us. Sometimes it is as dramatic as the metamorphosis that we see in nature, sometimes it is only when we stop to look back that we realize how much we have changed, and what made it happen. To me, this is what these paintings represent: the blank piece of paper, putting down marks to see what they can become, to add words and see what feeling emerges from that, and finally to share them with others and have it become yet another thing.

This is the best part—I hope you can be there.

Lucky to say that I’ll start 2020 with a solo exhibition of 40 paintings: January 3-29 at the Village Theater in Canton, with an opening reception January 9, 7-9pm.

Please stop in if you can to see the new paintings and say hello. In conjunction with the exhibit, I will also be conducting a workshop on January 22, 6-8pm in the gallery space discussing how I approach my painting, specifically, combining poetry and painting, with a focus on haiku.

It’s been a busy year of sharing my work in exhibits and through my website. Meeting the people who purchased paintings and hearing why a specific painting was meaningful to them was the best part for me. It confirmed for me the power of creating and sharing—I think that this is what humans are best at. Certain images and words speak to us and stay with us as we go through life.

On the wall next to my painting table I have an eight-foot-long tackboard where I put up bits and pieces of interesting or meaningful things. Throughout 2019 it slowly built up with layers of mini paintings and textures, posters of songbirds and the constellations by month, strips of birch bark and dried maple tree seed pods. Last week I had the urge to take it all down, so I did.

With the end-of-year urge to sort, I was looking through a box of old paintings and collected images last night. Up on the tackboard this morning went a few treasured things to welcome the new year: a charcoal drawing my dad made decades ago of the Detroit River at night from Belle Isle with a sickle moon in the sky and a weeping willow probably still growing there to this day; an old pen drawing of mine of a bare-branched stand of spring trees; a quote from Wallace Stevens from a poem-a-day calendar I had in my 20s; a priceless (to me) 5 cent stamp with a portrait of Thoreau by Leonard Baskin on it; a Hiroshige print I never framed with a V of geese criss-crossing the moon; a copy I made in ink of a Ben Shahn painting of two brothers because I loved it so much; and a photo of some woods in the deep north of Michigan where I got lost one morning with my first dog.

These words and images are as familiar to me as my own hand, but pulling them out now and putting them on this wall they are mysteries to be unlocked again. Things, people, and experiences percolate inside us over the years, they turn in our consciousness, run in our dreams, and continually break out into new things. Henry David said, “Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”