Blog

Hello Everyone!

I finally got myself out painting this March after an extended winter respite.  It felt so good to be outdoors and back in the familiar, but it had been so long (relatively speaking) that it was new as well.

I love painting landscapes. 

Not being well traveled I tend to paint the same ones repeatedly.  Which is nice because I know where to be comfortable, and challenging because I don't want to paint a comfortable landscape.  I like to keep moving and learning.  It is important to me to respond to the moment of how I am doing and how the subject is doing.  We are each ever-changing and to do the same thing repeatedly doesn't allow for growth either as a person, or a painter.  And, it doesn't let us see the growth and changes in the subject.  So I try to build upon what I've already done.  

If I look at the person I was years ago, I see that I am a different person now.  That's the benefit of having so many birthdays.  Regrets?  Many.  But, I have good moments in there as well.  Something to build upon.  I like to learn, always have.  It's fun to me.  In the fall of the first year of the pandemic (this is how we mark time now) with the encouragement of a friend I started relearning the Spanish I had forgotten since High School days.  My lofty goal is to be able to read fairly well and watch television shows.  If I am lucky, I could manage a conversation.  At the rate I am going it will be another couple of years before I reach a true intermediate level.  I am ok with that.  The process itself is so much fun.  As it is with painting.

If I look at the artist I was years ago, my paintings are very different now.  There's a thread that connects them all, a common ground of things tried that were successful and remembered for the next painting.  This spring I've been trying to keep a bit of what makes a painting mine as well as trying my brush at the next toehold up what can seem like a sheer cliff of painting know-how.

I hope you like A New Way as much as I do.  I went back to a familiar place in some pine trees (of course...standard for me before the leaves come back out in the spring).  I stood there and thought.  Stood there and looked.  And then I tried to see the beauty that has been there all along... and tried to paint what was new in it to me.

I hope you are all safe and well this Spring!  Follow your hearts, tend gently to your souls.

love,

Jill Peckelun