I was in bed. Not sleeping. Just in bed the way you are when the world has asked too much of you in too short a time and your body decides that horizontal is the only reasonable response. I had found an airbnb in Aubervilliers, northern Paris, far enough from the centre that it felt like a different city. Concrete and quiet and nobody knew me there. I had the curtains drawn. He messaged and told me to meet him on the street. I came out the gate and there he was, standing in t

"The sketchbook is where I catch things before they're gone." The Sketchbook I travel with sketchbooks the way other people travel with cameras. I have about ten of them now. They've been to Vancouver, New York, Arizona, Mexico City, Los Cabos, Puerto Vallarta, France, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Estonia, Greece, Venice, Prague, Holland. Each one holds a specific quality of light from a specific place at a specific moment that a photograph woul

Last week I wrote about how I price my work. The formula, the hourly rates, the honest data behind the numbers. That blog is about what I can put a price on. This one is about what I can't. There is a door in Santo Spirito that took me forty minutes. I was waiting for someone who doesn't know what on time is. I had an airbnb in the village, alone in it for the first time that trip, and I went outside for a smoke and propped myself against the wall with a cigarette in one hand

"The formula stays. The confidence is a work in progress." How I Price My Work I price my paintings using a formula: materials plus an hourly rate based on the medium, with a small addition for commissioned work. Acrylics I price at $45 an hour. Watercolour at $25 because I'm still developing in that medium and I don't think it's fair to charge for learning time I'm still accumulating. Studies and demo pieces get minimum wage because that's honest about what they are. On pape

I was standing on a dark quiet road in Berlin. It was late. I was alone. For the first time in my adult life I wasn't running through exit strategies in my head. I wasn't mapping the space, cataloguing who was near me, calculating what could go wrong and how fast I could move if it did. I was just standing there. On a road. In the dark. In a foreign country where I spoke just enough of the language that I could get a coffee or beer and a bite to eat. And I felt safe. The thou

"By the time I finished I could think again." Painting as Anxiety Management I have high functioning anxiety. It's rooted in PTSD from experiences I've written about elsewhere and won't repeat here. What matters for this post is what I've found that works. Painting works. Not in a vague wellness way. Specifically and mechanically. When my nervous system is dysregulated, when the anxiety is running and the thoughts are circular and nothing is resolving, picking up a brush forc

"The work happens in the margins. It always has. I've stopped apologizing for that." What Shift Work Does to a Creative Practice I work three days, three nights, and six days off. Except getting that six off is never a guarantee. Add in travel and football and time turns into my most valuable asset. On paper this schedule should be terrible for a creative artistic practice. And in some ways it is. There's no consistent rhythm or flow. I have no reliable window of when I will

"I am making the work she didn't get to see me make." My Mother's Paintings My mother was a painter. Margaret Morisette. Impressionistic landscapes, oil on canvas, the kind of work that had an elegance to the brushwork that I didn't fully understand when I was a child sitting beside her watching. Looking back now, with painter's eyes, I can see she was classically trained. The way she handled light. The economy of her marks. Nobody self-teaches that kind of control. There was

In Part 1 we talked about what to put in a sketchbook. In Part 2 we talked about how to pick the right one. Part 3 is about what happens after, and the answer is not always what you would expect. Sometimes a sketchbook page becomes a painting. Sometimes it becomes nothing at all. Both are valid and I mean that without any qualifier attached. When it does become something It rarely arrives in a straight line. Sometimes it is the way light hit an object that I captured quickly

In Part 1 we talked about what to put in a sketchbook. But before you can do any of that you have to pick the right one for the job, and that is not something anyone can tell you upfront. It takes trial and error and paying attention to what you actually need versus what you thought you needed. I did not arrive at my system from a guide. I built it by using books until I understood what was missing. I started with a store bought travel journal. Pretty cover, structured prompt

Most people only ever see my travel sketchbooks. Those ones are a finished work in themselves, carefully observed, full of color and place. If they saw my work books they would ask if I was actually a professional artist. Fragmented. Messy. Honestly, someone would probably call them ugly. But voila. I am. I get why people freeze up with a new one though. You crack the cover and suddenly have no idea what belongs in it. The blank page problem is real, and when your feed is ful

New glasses New way of seeing I got new glasses recently. This is relevant but not in the way you'd expect. I wore them to a life drawing session in Paris with "life drawing Montmartre" ,side note highly recommend them, which seemed like a reasonable thing to do. I am a painter. I was there to draw. Surely seeing more clearly would help. It did not help. First attempt I kept trying to draw the model and the glasses were giving me every detail, every line, every distraction be

In Bari a woman apologized for her age. In Paris a man told me his age and then immediately said sorry, as though the number itself required forgiveness. He was forty nine, fluent in three languages, had lived a life full enough to fill the bookshelves I went straight for when I walked into his apartment. And he apologized. I don't understand this. I have had white hair since I was twenty one. I have wrinkles now. I wore a wrap dress in Italy that fit way too close and showed

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