Things we can't recall

Things We Can't Recall

"And I believe in love. And beauty. I believe that every single person has something they find beautiful and that they truly love. The smell of their child's hair. the silence of a forest, their lover's crooked grin. Their country, their religion, their family. And I believe that if you follow this love all the way to its end, if you start with the thing you find most beautiful and trace its perfume back to its essence, you will perceive an intangible presence, a swath of stillness that allows the thing you love to be visible like the openness of the sky reveals the presence of the moon."

This quote is from Geneen Roth's book Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything which is rocking my world right now.

Things We Can't Recall is a new painting about those details of the things that we find most beautiful, that permeate us until only the trace remains because in time, we have become them and they have become us.
It is about the distant echo of a heartbeat. The trace of a scent long forgotten. A quiet dear voice.

Marrakesh

Marrakesh

Sometimes when I am working on a large group of new paintings I have a couple in progress that are pure fun, that I jump in and out of when I need a light hearted romp to play with color. Marrakesh is such a painting, built on daydreams and fancy. I've been loving this blog about life in Marrakesh for a while, and some day dream of going there. I'm picturing sitting by a lotus pond on a blindingly sunny brilliant day,

You step inside to the cool of the shaded courtyard,

Where the soft sound of the trickling fountain refreshes you, but there are surprises waiting for you through the courtyard door, beckoning you out again,

Out onto the winding, dusty streets, with crumbling walls and inspiration in every direction.

Out into the dark bazaar, where light sneaks through the slatted ceiling and exotic wares of every kind catch your eye.

OK, OK, enough day dreaming*. I'm snapping out of it and heading back to the studio. Sending you lovely weekend wishes. Prints of Marrakesh are now available here.

One last note...I had a nice surprise this morning, my new painting Cinder and Smoke, along with another of my paintings called Essence, were featured on the front page of Lovely Clusters in this beautiful spread...

*I took all of the "Morocco" photos at Epcot in their version of Marrakesh, a pretty cool place to wander around and daydream.

Sending wishes from my studio

I'm dreaming my way through many turquoise paintings over here, for two weeks I've been working on them and loving it. When I looked at my studio table the other day, I saw this windowed hallway in the Anthropologie catalogue laying beneath one of my paintings, it completely transported me.

Wishing you inspiring, vivid, exciting dreams, and the courage to make them real!

[Painting of the Week] Cascade

Cascade, mixed media on canvas

This piece is about how I feel when I'm full to brimming with emotion, with energy, with ideas...all buzzing around in my heart and in my head creating an overflow,

a Cascade.
We have spent the past week exploring beautiful Cornwall, the south west peninsula of England, where we stayed in a cottage on a farm. It has been breath-taking and overwhelming for the senses, just fantastic.
I can't wait to share photos of all that beauty here. I think I'll have a moment to sit in quiet tonight at my brother's house and process it all. 
More England... coming soon.

Horizon

Horizon

I have always been drawn to Horizons. That point of intersection between the earth, sky and sea holds so much allure. There are the emotional and mental sort of horizons as well, when you can just feel something coming close...a breakthrough, or breakdown. You can catch glimpses of what's approaching, and gain insights into the bigger picture.
Inspired by Asian landscapes, enchantment and mystery this painting is about the possibility that Horizons hold.

I just added this new original painting to my shop, prints will be available soon.

Before and After: a tale of a home renovation, part 1

We live in a beautiful, historic area of Brooklyn, full of stately rows of Brownstone homes with wrought iron gates and fences. The area of Park Slope is actually a national historic site and we live one block into the neighboring area of Windsor Terrace. These neighborhoods were built in the late 1800's, and the homes contain all of the detailing that you can imagine from that era.

Let's talk about dream fulfillment for a moment, Frank and I met in 2000 and as we talked about our goals, desires and dreams, Frank admitted that one of his dreams, since moving to New York, had always been to buy and renovate a Brownstone. I began to get excited about that idea with him. After we were married we still talked about doing that, but we were caught up in living our lives, making our art, and did not take any action.

In 2003 I had a late miscarriage with our first pregnancy. Sometimes it takes something like that to give you just the kick you need, it shakes the fear off of you, it wakes you up. A month after our loss Frank began looking at houses for sale, I was still in a state of sitting at home, but he would call me from the houses and tell me about them.

The day before Halloween he went to an open house, he called me while he was there and told me that I had to come see it that same day, he made an appointment for the realtor to show it to us that evening. As we walked through we could see the potential hidden behind years of neglect and dust. The house obviously needed a major renovation, but that put it within our price range, and we just knew what we could make that house into! We made an offer two days later, and it was accepted that week.

We closed on the house the 1st week of April 2004, so it will be 6 years in a couple of weeks, and oh have we come so far! I was pregnant with Jasper when we began the renovation that spring, so I wasn't much help to Frank who did almost all of the work himself. Above is what the house looked like the day we closed, it is the one painted beige with the strange awnings (I think we took those off that day). It is too bad that we don't have a picture of the way the outside of the house looked before the woman who lived there moved out. She had so many little decorations hanging and sitting on the front stoop, there was a Madonna in a half shell, many windmills, some gnomes and small stone animals...you name it and she had the lawn decoration on the steps. People on our block still joke about that with us.

Here is the outside of our house today, you can see that we painted the cornice my favorite color, Turquoise.

Here is another "Before"...

and another "After"...

So, I hope that you enjoyed part one of the tale of our home renovation. I will continue it with part two, in which I will invite you inside to see what we did with the Living Room, expect lots of "before and after" pictures!
Here is a picture of how it looks in summertime with all of our plants in bloom. I can't wait to show you the garden!

Haven

Haven

::Your heart is my haven, between mountain and sea::

A sweet new painting inspired by origami paper and thoughts on love. Here are those little birds again, I am really loving them, I think I'd hug them if I could!
They have found a soft landing here, a safe haven.
This print is new in the shop today.
Happy weekending!

How I'm feeling today

Sometimes you have to look through a whole pile of rocks....

Before you find the one with the perfect circle.

*photos taken last week in Malibu, CA

Northern lights

The glow of these amazing photos just feels like the epitome of cozy to me. What a glorious way to celebrate the approach of the Winter Solstice at our darkest time of the year. There is something about the Northern Lights that seems so fantastical and surreal. It is one of those things that I just have to take on faith that it really happens so far north!
And those teepees call to even this "summer" girl!

* Images of the Northern Lights in Yellow Knife Canada, forwarded from friends in the UK.

Worlds within Worlds

Worlds within Worlds

I am the sort of person that needs a lot of time to dream, those hours at night are not enough for me, if I do not have time and space in which to wander inside my head then I am not myself. I day dream about concrete things like our next family vacation, fantasy trips, house projects and houses that I'd love to live in, where we might move, living abroad....and then not so concrete things like pattern and color, animals and insects, people that I have loved, people that I miss, times in my life that were so different than my reality now, the transient nature of everything that we experience, my mind wanders.

That is what this new painting is about. I just finished it last week and I really like the way it is touching on those places that I can't describe in words. They are there somewhere all the time, those worlds within worlds.

There are also so many places that I visit online when I need some day dream fuel, here are two that I am really into right now: My Marrakesh, and Door Ways Traveler. Loving that I feel so transported just scrolling through.