The second time I went to Budapest I was shattered. I had gone only to see Dave. I saw him once, for a few hours, and then he was gone the way he always is, somewhere he needed to be that wasn't where I was. I won't pretend that didn't hurt because it did and I was terrible at hiding it that trip. I found a coffee shop with a back garden. One of those quiet Budapest places that don't announce themselves, you just find them when you need them. I sat in the back with my sketchb

There is a pot in my bedroom. A twenty dollar drip brew situation that has never once let me down. Ok, maybe once, we've worked past that. I keep good coffee in it because I am not an animal Italian most days but any well roasted coffee will do. I never leave stale water in the reservoir because we have standards even on the bad days. The first thing I do when I come home, from anywhere that required something of me, is make coffee. Not unpack. Not check messages. Not do the

"Paris isn't Paris because of the city. It's the people you find inside it." What Paris Actually Feels Like I hated Paris the first time. I want to be honest about that because the mythology around Paris is so thick that admitting you hated it feels almost like a character flaw. But I did. It was overwhelming and loud and I couldn't speak much french and everyone seemed to already know where they were going and I did not. What changed it for me was the people. Paris isn't Par

"He lost interest. I didn't." Learning Guitar Badly and Why I Keep Going I started learning guitar during COVID because my son wanted to learn. He lost interest quickly. I didn't. This is probably a personality trait at this point. I pick things up because someone else is interested and then they leave and I stay. The guitar sat in the corner after he moved on and I kept picking it up whenever I had a spare moment, figuring out chords, playing badly, playing slightly less bad

"The market corrected me." The Painting That Wouldn't Sell My “Winter Tree" painting had been sitting in my shop for a while. Nobody touched it. I finally put it on sale at $35 and still no one looked at it. I had painted it during a Fort McMurray deep freeze. The kind that seeps into your bones and it physically hurts your face every time you go outside. If you ever felt anything minus thirty or below you know what I'm talking about. It's the kind of cold that makes you ques

"The first time I tried to find Grease Monkey I never made it on time. Budapest kept interrupting me." The Budapest Garden He stood me up again in Budapest. I won't get into the details because they don't really matter and also because he reads these occasionally and I'd like to keep him humble. What matters is I was alone in Budapest with a free afternoon I hadn't planned for. The normal thing to do would have been to go back to the apartment and sulk or go on a rant in a fi

"If I hadn't put my heart out there despite every reasonable objection, I would never have found that garden." The Budapest Garden He stood me up again in Budapest. I won't get into the details because they don't really matter and also because he reads these occasionally and I'd like to keep him humble. What matters is I was alone in Budapest with a free afternoon I hadn't planned for. The normal thing to do would have been to go back to the apartment and sulk or go on a rant

"People at the Fort McMurray art market call me the fruit lady. I've made peace with it." Why I Paint Fruit People at the Fort McMurray art market call me the fruit lady. I smile every time I say that. I didn't set out to be the fruit lady. It happened gradually, an orange here, some grapes there, a bowl of cherries that turned into a series. At some point the pattern became undeniable and now it's just part of who I am as a painter. The fruit lady. I actually quite enjoy it.

A Journey Through Loneliness When you're a painter trying to convey what a painting means to you, it forces you to sit down and be honest with yourself. This blog reflects on "Citrus Liturgy." It was easy to say this painting emerged from a feeling of loneliness, but it was a loneliness I had never felt before. There wasn't a specific person I could point to and say, "I miss this person." Instead, it was just a feeling. Creating this painting made me pause and contemplate why

Framed library print of Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette on my bedroom wall It was 1995 when the library held an art sale. Every few years, they cleared out books pulled from the shelves. They set them up in the mall across the street, right under the artificial skylight. I always looked forward to this event. Back then, the internet was just beginning to emerge. Books were still the primary way to chase down any information. My favorite aisle was the reference section. T

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Budapest Nights This weeks blog will be the transcript of my new youtube video of my watercolor painting Budapest Nights. I'll link the video at the bottom if you prefer to watch it instead. I have a stack of drawings and ideas that lay within my sketchbooks and pads of papers. Each lovingly drawn or laid out. Waiting for when I find the medium to bring them to life. This drawing hid quietly for two years waiting for the light to once again skim across its page. I had started