The Trail the Artist Left Behind

When we look at art, we don’t just receive a message. We experience what the artist felt while making it.

It’s a little like meditation. You slow down, you notice things, you follow the trail the artist left behind.

The layers tell you something. Free-flowing washes, cracked texture, collage, palette knife marks – each one carries the energy of the moment it was made. The colors do too. Warm, golden tones feel different from cool blues, not because we decided they should, but because the artist was feeling something when they reached for that color.

I’m painting something right now with more yellow than I’ve ever used before – wide, golden washes over a layer of floral patterns underneath. And as I’m working, this feeling of pure joy just spreads through me. I keep thinking: the sunlight is licking the canvas.

Even the brush strokes have a voice. Strong and energetic, or soft and flowing? In the piece I’m working on now, there’s a white horse. And wrapping a brush stroke around its face – that’s the only way I can describe it – feels like a caress.

So creating and viewing aren’t as different as we might think. Both are ways of experiencing art – of slowing down, paying attention, and letting it move through you.

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In the studio

I’m currently working on a large equine piece – a woman riding a white horse through a field of flowers. It’s a 36×36 inch mixed media painting, and right now it’s in that messy middle phase. The big bold moves are behind me, and now it’s all about resolving the painting and working into the details. It’s slower, more careful work, and honestly a little uncomfortable.

I also set myself back two days with a bit of an experiment gone wrong. I’d heard that mixing clove oil into your paint slows down drying on the palette, which sounded great. What I didn’t fully think through is that it would also slow down drying on the canvas – significantly. Two days later the paint was still wet, and I panicked. Not knowing how long it would take to cure, I made the call to wipe it all off. Two painting sessions, gone. Lesson learned.

On a more exciting note, I recently started a drawing course with Watts Atelier of the Arts. It’s back to basics – shapes, shading, fundamentals. I’m sharing some of my exercises below.

I spent nearly 20 years in software engineering, where you build things in iterations – each cycle a little deeper, a little more refined than the last. That thinking never left me, and it shapes how I approach learning to paint too.

When I came to art a little over a year ago, I threw myself into everything at once – drawing, oil painting, mixed media. That was the right move then. It helped me find my voice quickly, validate that I wanted to do art long term.

But now it feels like time to go deeper, to build a stronger foundation while continuing to grow my body of work. I never want to reach a point where I think I know everything. That’s when growth stops.