Every artist has their own language and their own technique.
This is how I work.
Actually creating a painting—well, a series—is the process of taking the colors and shapes and feelings and ideas collected watching the seasons change and then picking out the simplest bits to see what they do when I put them together on a canvas.
I’ve currently got six canvases in progress that I started in different spots around the countryside here in Dordogne.
I'm using the same brushstrokes and colors to create different impressions of summer giving way to fall in southwestern France.
I mostly use fat bristly brushes for rushing trails of brushstrokes that feel like the undeniable energy of being alive.
Flat foam brushes dipped in alcohol and ink for the slow spread of color that is those creeping feelings you can’t quite make out.
Water poured over acrylic paint and swooshed across the canvas with my fingers for all that stuff wooshing around in the background.
A palette knife or a tiny round brush for details—those small, sharp contrasts that throw life into high relief.
Dry pigment blown over wet; a sudden squeeze or spatter of paint stretching into an unexpected color. There are so many textures to experience—some that sneak up on you suddenly.
There’s always a line through that we try to draw to make sense of it all.
And color to fill in the details.
What is it like to be alive and feel whatever an artist-mother-seeker-dreamer feels as the summer turns to fall amid the fields and rivers and villages of southwestern France these days?
It feels like firethorn pale orange and wild marjoram burgundy. Like the crackly brown of a panoply of burs and the not-quite-white whites of cat ear dandelion fluff, spider’s webs caught in the light and the sparkle of morning dew reflected in the ten am sun. The orange, green, blue, and brown of the fluttering butterfly rainbow frolicking about the fields.
These are the colors of this moment.
This moment is also William starting to spell. “L’Europe: l-apostrophe-e-majuscule-u-r-o-p-e.”
James becoming spontaneously good at math. “If Mommy eats two eggs and Daddy eats two eggs, you and William eat two eggs and Ema eats one egg, how many eggs do we need to cook?”
“Nine.” Without a spot of hesitation. The kid is four.
What is this?
Why does life change so quickly?
I can never know exactly where we’re all headed, and yet I couldn’t wish for us to stay the same either.
The possibility of change—the principle of change—is what makes life possible.
I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Except we’re all headed where the butterflies are headed when the first frost comes.
And I would maybe want to be a little more at ease with that.
Change isn’t only joy and growth.
It’s also disappointment and loss. Just ask the butterflies in two months’ time.
I don’t know what they’d say, but somehow putting brush to canvas is a way of maybe finding out.
Insistent observation of change within and without can only yield understanding over time.
Perhaps a little peace and a little freedom, I would wager.
And so it goes with the colors of the season, my squeeze bottle, and a broken-bristled brush by the light filtering through the trees as purgatory sets in for the butterflies.
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