Before I was a painter, I was a writer, and the mother of two, a dedicated volunteer, and a community activist. When I picked up the brushes for the first time, I had to steal one day a week out of my already hectic schedule. I’d put my kids on the school bus and head[…]

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[…]

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[…]

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[…]