How do we paint together? Kaffe lives in London, I live in Big Sur. He works in acrylic, I work in oil. He is a textile designer, I am a fine art painter. We come together around color, and we find all the color we could want in the still life. In my mother’s house[…]

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[…]

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[…]

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[…]

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[…]

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[…]