Blog

Final Friday May 29, 2026

I find water a constant and compelling muse because it is never still: it resists, reflects, and transforms everything around it. Its waves create shifting light, turning the surface into a moving canvas of highlights, shadows, and refracted color.

I ponder on how water’s power comes from its ambiguity: it is transparent yet opaque, soft yet forceful, familiar yet hard to fully grasp. I try to create work that has a natural sense of motion and mystery.

Waves break light into fragments, so the eye reads water as constantly changing patterns rather than a single shape. Reflections are often much lighter than the colors inside the water, which creates contrast and depth. That is why water can look like glass in one moment and like metal or silk in the next.

Water is rarely just “blue.” Its palette often shifts toward blue-green, with deeper water darkening and shallow water warming toward yellows, oranges, and reds from reflected light and the bottom below. A bright aqua-like note can suggest clarity and freshness, especially in sunlit water.

From my point of view, water is a field of abstract shapes: arcs, ripples, crescents, and broken planes that keep reorganizing themselves. The rhythm of those forms gives water its visual energy, especially when wind or current creates layered motion.

Like me, water has “a surface that refuses to settle, always rewriting its own light.”

That captures both its resistance and its beauty: it pushes back against stillness while also revealing the world in shifting color, shape, and reflection.

This month’s exhibition reflects the natural rhythm of creativity as it mirrors the inner world. Whatever I’m studying in my mind and heart somehow finds its way onto my canvas—and this collection is no exception.

My newest piece, Blue Resistance, emerged from meditations on the Tao Te Ching and the concept of Water. Water yields, flows around obstacles, and continues on its path without losing strength. As I read aloud the verses, their energy translated into movement and visual rhythm—capturing the grace and persistence that define resistance itself.

Alongside it, I present Magnolia Grove, an homage to springtime in Eden Park. Each year, the vivid greens and dancing pink blossoms inspire a renewal of spirit and color. This piece celebrates that living palette—the tender balance between earth awakening and imagination blooming.

Since childhood, nature has been my muse. Growing up on a 43-acre farm in West Virginia, which I called Willow-View Acres, taught me to see life through the language of the land—the shifting light, the movement of water, and the textures of growth. That lifelong dialogue continues in every brushstroke.

Please join me for Final Friday on April 24th, 5–9 PM in Studio #712. I look forward to sharing this moment of renewal and reflection with you.

As the days lengthen and the balance of light and shadow returns, I find myself deeply attuned to the energies of the equinox. Each morning’s walk feels like a dialogue with the earth—buds pushing through soil, birdsong expanding into the air, the quiet hum of life beginning again. I try to carry that same nurturing rhythm into my studio, letting the awakening of spring guide my hand and heart. I feel the transition from winter’s introspection into spring’s movement. The months of stillness and contemplation have left traces in my work—soft, layered tones and subtle forms that now open into more vivid gestures and colors. There’s a dialogue unfolding between what was inward and what now wishes to emerge.

Bringing nature into my studio is more than metaphor; it’s a practice of presence. I collect small reminders—stones, branches, petals—that rest among my materials. They remind me that art, like the seasons, is an act of becoming. The canvases absorb that living energy, the push and pull between restraint and release, quiet and vitality.

This equinox feels like both an arrival and a turning point. It’s a time to honor the inner growth nurtured through winter’s darkness and to welcome the full bloom of creative possibility. My new works are born of that same threshold—where reflection meets renewal, where the artist steps once again into the widening light.

March 20, 2026

Oct. 26 2023

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Cecilia, Payne Gaposchkin (Cecilia Helene Payne) born May 10, 1900 through December 7, 1979 was a British born American astronomer and astrophysicist who proposed in her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Her groundbreaking conclusion was initially rejected because it contradicted the scientific wisdom of the time which held that there were no significant elemental differences between the sun and earth. Independent observations eventually proved she was correct her work on the nature of variable stars, it was foundational to modern astrophysics.

Trained as a chemist, Rosalind Franklin, create an x-ray photograph that provided evidence of the double helix structure of DNA models. The image was not proof, but critical evidence, as well as the data Franklin had arrived. When she analyze the image Watson and crick and their colleague, Maurice Wilkins came by the image and data legitimately in the course of their work, and no one ever seriously alleged intellectual theft, but no one pretends, either that they could have achieved their later breakthrough, proving a double helical structure of DNA without Franklins work, yet when Watson and crick publish their findings in 1953 and when they and Wilkins won the Nobel prize for the same findings in 1962, Rosalind Franklin was forgotten.

January 12, 2025

Robert De Niro Sr.

I didn’t realize when I worked with the painter, Bob De Niro, back in the 80’s that I was working with the father of Robert De Niro, the actor. He was a good looking gentleman so you would think that I would have put two and two together. I was mesmerized with him as an artist. The West Virginia Arts and Humanities brought him in for a workshop at the Huntington Art Museum. I was in graduate school and my professor, June Kilgour, highly recommended that I attend the workshop.

June Kilgour, who was also the head of the art department, had studied at Pratt and worked with George McNeill. McNeill had studied alongside Hans Hoffman at the New York School. With such influences, I felt immersed in the Abstract Expressionist movement and still do to this day. I got to work with McNeill a few times when we were in New York. Like jazz, Abstract Expressionist was the first American movement that was all American. So, when I found out that De Niro had worked with Hofmann, I was all in.

De Niro spoke the romantic language of Abstract Expressionism. He also spoke about Josef Albers. I find myself especially drawn to Albers work with color theory. Much to my surprise, he mentioned that he was of Irish and Italian descent. My father was Irish, having come over on the Potato boats, and the two were close in age. Nevertheless, De Niro was different from anyone I had ever met, a very kind gentleman. I was attracted to his cultural elegance. Though we didn’t talk much that weekend, I remember the awe I felt for him. He represented, to me, Abstract Expressionism.

De Niro held on to a formalism that was lost in the work of DeKooning or Pollock. He brought a gestural quality to his work. He spoke about Hofmann and Matisse, though his work reminded me of Gorky’s artwork (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arshile_Gorky) more than Hofmann. Some of his work was figurative and some non-representational. You could see the European influence on his work and yet he was breaking out of the pure European style into a style that was truly his own. He talked about the struggle he undertook in accomplishing that. I admire this, having worked my entire career establishing a signature style of my own. Back in those days creating your unique personal style was critical, you didn’t appropriate.

Another thing that impressed me was that he showed in the big name galleries. For one, I remember that he had a show with Peggy Guggenheim. She was such an icon in the art world at this time. He also mentioned one of my all-time favorite authors, Anais Nin. Her journals connected me to the Feminist Movement and helped me to understand that I could live and work a creative work style as a woman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaïs_Nin)