This year painting has become for me a form of meditation — the studio, a sanctuary — the work a solace. These new pieces come from a place of sinking into the moment, using the tools of observation and rendering to center me in the now. A new way of working with color has made[…]

Next week I’ll be returning to California to teach a new five day workshop at Esalen Institute. This new course is called The Art of Now, and is designed for artists and non-artists alike to reap the benefits of art-making practices in their ordinary every day lives. We will also explore habits that creative geniuses[…]

4 am and music is playing, the wind howls, shaking the windows, the curtains, a window slams in the other room. The music is coming from outside, wafting in, piano and cello, but the wind abbreviates it’s phrasing, and the window crashes like a cymbal and I am asleep again. One time in Florence we[…]

In Spannocchia the fruit trees are blooming, small pink blossoms with petals that fade to white, crisscrossing the sky as though making miniature blue panes of stained glass. One morning after walking I took a hot bath in the big tub in my room, the fragrant soap frothing up into iridescent bubbles. The morning walk,[…]

Kaffe taught me to seek beauty, and to find it in color. The beauty of a weird beige plastic card table against an array of singing red bowls in my mother’s house. The hallucinatory pink wall in a sea of white on a walk through winter in Vermont Before I was ever a painter he[…]

Workshop Description: Drop the story and just begin! With the guidance of award-winning artist Erin Lee Gafill and her husband, photographer Tom Birmingham, you’ll explore writing, painting, observational drawing, sketch & watercolor wash. With color and line, tone and word, we’ll cultivate “beginner’s mind”, exploring the connection between art-making and mindfulness. By the end of[…]

Italy changed me. And I wanted to be changed. I went for the first time when I was thirty, my son 11 years old, my daughter five. I wanted to connect with the creative source that had nurtured so many of my favorite artists, and to restore some of the broken branches in my family[…]

Today the list is long, with lots of projects and people to interact with, and decisions to make. I feel pulled in every direction. So I step away from the chaos and find a chair in a quiet room. I set my timer for ten minutes. I write out a list of what must be[…]

I paint alone, I write alone, I bake bread and work in my garden alone, and find solitude as essential to my being as food and water. But when we come together as a small group, three to thirty say, or more even, around a finite creative practice, something else as deeply integral to my[…]