For the month of May I’m offering 20% off paintings on my website…just use the promo code: MAY20. This painting, Sun over the forest, has just been added. The forest is a bounty, especially in May.

View up close in the gallery.

Sun over the forest does different things to it depending on the time of year. In summer, it can hardly penetrate the green ceiling of leaves—sending down funnels of dramatic light. In fall, it creates an otherworldly sense of change. In winter, it casts long blue shadows on snow. In spring, it pulls up the wildflowers out of the wet earth. They come in waves: Bloodroot, Trout Lily, Jack-in-the-pulpit, Wild Geranium, Marsh Marigold, Trillium, Lily of the Valley, St. James Wort…all of these and more appeared just this month.

Sun over the forest also does different things to you while you are in it.

I just added a batch of new paintings to my website, including this one, Inner workings. I’m offering 20% off all orders for the month…just use the promo code: MAY20.

View up close in the gallery.

This painting reflects the daily walks I’ve taken over these past couple of months as things change quickly here in Michigan. I have tried to become privy to the inner workings of as much as I can along the paths that I take. The pond comes to life as the patience of geese gives way to successfully hatched goslings. Larger fish appear from deeper waters and young painted turtles learn about a sunbath. Lichen and moss bloom like badges in the rain and suddenly the trees leaf out and bloom, too. The spring sky seems an indestructible blue.

I’ve got a box of artifacts collected during walks: rocks, pieces of fallen bark, feathers. It is the imprint of these magical things that give strength. It is the same as the horses that Dylan Thomas describes in his poem Fern Hill, dazed at the sheer beauty of it all:

So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

May in Michigan just might be the most beautiful time of year. To celebrate the yellow willow tree buds busting, the tiny (yet mighty) hepatica and bloodroot poking through last year’s leaves, and the newly hatched goslings at the pond this morning, I’m offering 20% all orders on my website for the month…just use the promo code: MAY20.

Even though in-person exhibits have come to a halt for now, I’m still painting every day. Watch for new paintings to be added to the site throughout the month. I’m also walking daily, writing, and re-reading favorite poets and learning the work of new ones. One poet who I came to learn about just last year is Wendell Berry. I’m not sure how I lived so long before reading his poems but I’m so glad I finally did. His poems express a fervent observation and reverence for nature—and how we as humans, can take comfort and rest in our place within it. This is the second half of his poem, The Finches, wishing them, and us, well as we emerge from the cold of April:

May the year warm them
soon. May they soon go

north with their singing
and the season follow.
May the bare sticks soon

live, and our minds go free
of the ground
into the shining of trees.

View the full gallery.

Next Wednesday, January 22, 6-8pm, I’ll be leading a workshop on poetry and painting. There are a few spots still available. It will take place in the gallery space at the Village Theater in Canton, where my solo exhibit, Transmutations, is currently hanging through the 29th.

The practice of combining words and painting is an endless puzzle. It requires observation and articulation and is something that I will never grow tired of: the moon in all of its phases, the tiniest mushroom on the forest floor, the city’s light on the river, the face of a friend, the memory of a hard time, the hope of a new idea. The poet Mary Oliver said, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”