Preparing for my next solo show has been a wild ride. My original idea was to create an exhibit on borders and boundaries with a series of 25 experimental monoprints. But the reflective time offered by my residency at the Vermont Studio Center led me down a different path.

I followed the path into the unknown and found myself in the middle of an interdisciplinary series of works that I had not anticipated at all. Interdisciplinary? Yep. Drawings, oil paintings, fiber, and found objects. No monoprints at all!

And this change has meant overcoming some absurd obstacles. Let me tell you the story of my fairly simple idea of using charcoal on wood to draw an immigrant woman and child at Ellis Island in the early 1900s.

At the beginning of January, I drove through light snow towards Boston. The little bits of blue sky that had been visible began disappearing as I made my way northwest through New Hampshire. The snow was coming down pretty heavily when I crossed over into Vermont. And by the time I drove past Montpelier, it was hard to see anything but white in all directions. The snowstorm engulfed my car on the twisty mountain roads.

My destination was the Vermont Studio Center, where I was to begin an artist residency, and start a brand-new series of paintings on boundaries, borders and borderlands. I had exciting

Back in the 1970s, whenever I felt the excitement of a new idea or a new adventure, I would play my vinyl recording of Bob Dylan’s New Morning on our old turntable. Some days, I’d play it over and over, belting out “so happy just to be alive, underneath the sky of blue, on this new morning, new morning…” along with the music.  

That was a very long time ago, but I still feel the same exploding energy whenever I feel the eureka moment of a brand-new idea. And sometimes these ideas present themselves in the most unexpected places.

At artists’ meeting last week, a woman I haven’t seen in a few years leaned across the table saying, “Your painting style has changed so much. What’s that about?”
It’s true. My paintings have changed—a lot!
What IS that about?
I had no ready answer.
Later in that same meeting, another artist asked me, “Where do all your different ideas come from?”
And that’s when I realized my work doesn’t begin with an idea. It always starts with the question, “What would happen if…”

August brought record-breaking heat across the nation. Even here in coastal New England, my studio was sweltering. It was like trying to work in a sauna. Everything occurred in slow motion. My hair stuck to my face and neck. I tried splashing cold water on my face and running my giant fan full-blast. It usually does a good job, despite deafening me in the process. But this year’s heat was too much. It was time to make lemonade from lemons…

I was not painting.

I was waiting to receive some important source material for a big project I’ve been working on—more about that another day. But because of the delayed source material, I found myself going down a rabbit hole of reading, questioning, and experimenting with my paintings.

I’ve had a laser-like focus on a single project for the past two months, but then I had to hit the pause button. It’s a dangerous thing to suddenly become untethered like this—especially if you’re a reader like I am.

I found myself curled up with a pile of books in the corner of my studio—supposedly planning my next painting. And while I ruminated about water, its many faces, and the role it has played since the very beginnings of life on earth, my mind wandered to John Locke’s quest to understand the “primary qualities of an object.” What? You don’t do that too?

So now you see how dangerous a pile of books can be. Before I knew it, I was digging through old dusty volumes of Rene Descartes’ work, and thinking about Cartesian Dualism and all kinds of philosophical questions that seemed very important to answer. Poor Doug had to listen to me ramble on about these things over dinner, when I tried to explain why all this was actually me preparing for a new series of paintings.

An important part of my studio practice is taking regular walks along the shoreline, listening to the swish of the waves slapping on the sand, breathing the scent of the salt air, and squinting across the water to the distant horizon.

While my artworks are created in a studio, inspiration usually comes through reconnecting with nature. In fact, themes of the natural world, and our human connections to nature run through most of my work. I think of the words of science professor Robin Wall Kimmerer, “I come here to listen, to nestle in the curve of the roots in a soft hollow of pine needles, to lean my bones against the column of white pine, to turn off the voice in my head until I can hear the voices outside it: the shhh of the wind . . . and something more—something that is not me, for which we have no language”

I am a reader, and much of my work is informed by my reading — everything from Emily Dickinson and Dylan Thomas to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Robert Macfarlane’s Underland.

Like most of us, I have been deeply concerned about climate change. Reading The Human Age, by Jane Ackerman, I began feeling less hopeless and thinking more about the varied possibilities for the future of the planet. Yes, we were making a mess of things, but there are still some possibilities for change.

Other books on my nightstand in the past year or so have deepened my feelings about the environment. These have included Braiding Sweetgrass, By Robin Wall Kimmerer; Sacred Nature, by Karen Armstrong; Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape, by Cal Flyn; I Contain Multitudes, by Ed Young; and strangely enough A Field Guide to Rock Art Symbols, by Alex Patterson.

In one of my favorite passages from The Sublime and the Avant Garde, Jean-François Lyotard writes:

“…the possibility of nothing happening, of words, of colours, forms or sounds not coming: of the sentence being the last, of bread not coming daily. This is the misery that the painter faces with a plastic surface, of the musician with the acoustic surface, the misery the thinker faces with a desert of thought, and so on. Not only faced with the empty canvas or the empty page, at the ‘beginning’ of the work, but every time something has to be waited for, and thus forms a question at every point of questioning, at every ‘and what now?’”

As artists we all feel that anxiety of the empty canvas, that moment of “nothing” while the canvas stands blank, new, and empty of thought.

Viewers often ask me why there are so many circles in the Seeds of Change series. Are they planets? The sun? Round seeds? Well, yes. All of these things. But also something more

My thoughts about the universality of life and matter led to my use of the circle as a symbol for feelings of connectedness. For many centuries, the circle and sphere have been linked to transcendence, vastness, and connectedness. Generation after generation, thinkers have used circles and spheres as metaphors for concepts of infinity, immeasurable space, timelessness, connectedness, oneness with God or with nature.

In his 1841 essay, “Circles.” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end” and “Our life is an apprenticeship to truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”

I named my first solo exhibition Waking Dreams, because that’s how I feel when I’m “in the zone” working on an art project.

As artists we need to find ways to access the unconscious. It’s similar to those moments when we are barely awake from dreaming, moments when images and memories float freely through our minds without outside control. As an artist I reach for those uncontrolled and subconscious images and sensations—like being startled awake, still feeling the terror and horror of tumbling down into a vast and deep unknown space, like Alice through the looking glass; or opening my eyes, still feeling the vague euphoria of flying freely above the world. Much of my artwork evolves from accessing these hazy half-remembered feelings.

Throughout most of our busy days we engage in task-related or task-directed thought. We solve problems, commute to work, schedule activities, keep appointments, buy groceries, pay our bills, figure out how to assemble things, read the news and make decisions. But when we let go of those everyday tasks and conscious control of our minds, we open the door to possibilities for spontaneous thought.