Summer Residency and Something new

Hello from mid summer!

I spent June mostly in Maine at a residency in Castine Maine, painting.

Castine Maine is a small, very historic New England town on Penobscot Bay, near where I go every summer for a couple of weeks. The Annex Arts residency was a lovely gift to me this summer, thanks to Gallery B, Goody B Wiseman, Ruthie, Julie, Amelia, Jasper and others who all help make the magic happen there.

I was productive. And my Maine community was very responsive to the fruits of my labor. I made a number of new paintings, new friends, established new collectors, and reconnected with people who have been living with my landscapes on their walls for decades. Overall, it was a deeply nourishing experience. It felt like a homecoming.

I learned a lot from my fellow residents as well: Mara, Viktor, Sara and Marwa all overlapped for some period of the time I was there, and they are each and every one fascinating and talented artists and people. See their work linked below also.

Viktor Butko, Sara MacCulloch and Mara Korkola were with me most of June, and Marwa Abdul Rahman and Robert Dewhurst came after, followed by Hannah Bureau. All very talented people!

​I had never been a swan among swans before — meaning just with other landscape painters — and it was a very edifying, satisfying and educational experience! I felt among tribe in a way that was really new and long overdue. While there I got my oil painting chops together, after seeing the seasoned moves of Viktor, Sara and Mara for making the most out of their time in Castine and in residence.

This was my first experience purely prioritizing abstract landscape, and some very cool things came out of this.

1. I got to know my own process by being among others with their own distinct process to mine. For example, I work on a bunch of surfaces at once. Others do one painting at a time. Several of us find we sometimes have to destroy a thing before it emerges as what it is meant to be.

2. I got familiar with what I LOVE to do, what is deeply satisfying to me, versus what’s kind of a pill that I may be able to skip in the future. For example, I have always been a photographer, and this summer, my compositions began by pushing my camera to deal with low light, blurs, and unusual angles. I loved haunting the quiet streets as people’s lights came on in their white, clapboard homes…


3. I came to enjoy sharing about process with people who stopped in, something that at other times has been very challenging for me.

This little painting is of a Castine house at night, from across a marshy field. The photo above is one I shot on one of several nighttime walks I savored while there.

​​4. Most importantly my seeing changed. The actual cones in my eyes adjusted to all of the careful looking and visual thinking, sketching, photographing, discussing, problem solving, hunting and color analysis and pigment mixing that was going on regularly. I started to see nuances I wasn’t aware of before and driving down the road became quietly overwhelming with all there was to see. This was very exciting and led to something new that I have here to share with you.

A new series called I’m thinking I’m seeing...or something like that...I'm still working on it.

This series is new in two ways: one the topic and two, the form.

1. The topic:

This is me driving around photograph everything I see...

​A visual diary in audio recordings, photographs, images of my artwork and a written, slightly modified transcript of what I’m saying. So I will deliver to you a) images, words, sounds and ideas. b)I will ask you to share your responses to my jazzy shares as you are inspired, and will likely end each one with a question/prompt to guide you.


I made the discovery that I learn as much from verbalizing what I am seeing as from sketching or photographing it. This discovery came about as I realized my camera wasn’t catching the intensity of color. But when I talk about it, the intensity is in my voice, description, mixed with the sounds of the place I’m in.

2. New platform! As I share these, please give me feedback about what does interest you, where you connect, what it inspires in you, and what you find cumbersome or opaque/obtuse. This will help steer us in the best direction as I proceed.

I am making a leap to Substack. It’s a great leap to make and so much less cumbersome to use for us all! So please let me know if you don’t want to hear from me (no hard feelings) otherwise, you will only notice a slightly different format and more audio options. I hope you will enjoy.

Substack is an online platform that enables writers and other content creators to publish and distribute their work, offering a space for building community that’s less cumbersome to use and offers the reader levels of engagement if they want more.

Learn more about all the artists in residents at Annex Arts here.

I am in a lot of transit and motion, so it might be a little while before you hear more from me about this, but I will do my best to follow up sorta soon. Thanks for tuning in, and if you find yourself in northern coastal Maine, stop by the gallery in Castine and see some of what I and others have there at Gallery B!