"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

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

"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.

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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