art: the shoreline series

Hi friends. It's been a year, huh? Or like... ten years? A million? Life has changed a lot over here and I'm long overdue in sharing my newest work with you!

I remember reading about Covid-19 a year ago when it seemed alarming but very far away. It crept closer and closer week by week until one afternoon in March I left my studio, picked up my toddler Maddie from daycare and felt my heart sink when I learned she had been the only child brought there that day. The next day all daycares in Boston were ordered closed indefinitely, along with all playgrounds, libraries, restaurants, stores, everything. My studio building was closed to visitors. All open studios, shows and local art markets were cancelled for the year. As we looked out our window at empty city streets, it felt like a power outage in slow motion.

Here's the last photo I took in my studio before the building shut down for 2020:

In the year since then, my family packed up our Boston home and moved to a little seaside town south of the city, welcoming our newborn son mid-pandemic and staying very isolated for his sake. I turned our new porch into a studio, painting and packing online orders during nap times and after bedtime.

The uncertainty of the past year has made me embrace a more thankful mindset every day: to remember we are safe at home versus stuck at home and to gratefully explore within the bounds of our new town and its long, beautiful shoreline.

I could write a hundred love letters to our town beach. I love it. It saved me this year. For months while everything was closed we visited daily: while I was hugely pregnant I set Maddie free to hunt seashells and horseshoe crabs while I rested my feet in the surf, and after Wilder was born, I snuggled him as my husband Mike and Maddie built sandcastles near our picnic blanket. With our once wide open world so constrained and isolated, I could count on this bit of shoreline to help renew me and my painting practice. I took photos constantly and played with them in my sketchbook at nap times. Every visit made me appreciate smaller, sweeter details and put them onto paint and paper.

Inspired by each visit was The Shoreline Series, a group of eight small paintings on paper featuring different experiences at the rocky edge of the sea. Working small was actually more challenging for me than the big pieces I've been making over the past few years. At 8"x10", each small detail is bigger, every piece of found paper and wash of paint matters more. Every brush stroke or pencil mark is a louder word, as perhaps each moment is when we're forced to live smaller.

CLICK HERE to see the rest of the Shoreline Series is here. Each piece ready-to-frame, matted to 11"x14" in a crisp white mat that helps balance the gritty details of paint and ink emulsion. Most have sold but there will be prints available soon!

Wishing you a healthy, happy spring as we find our way back into the world.