Gossamer Wings

48 × 48”

Oil glazing on Acrylic subpainting

Delicate insect wings dance through luminous garden light. Orange bursts meet atmospheric blues.

Discipline Builds Depth

My abstract paintings invite the viewer to linger and discover. The moment awareness replaces consumption—that's when the work begins to reveal itself.

The painting doesn't change. The observer does.

But here's what I've learned after thirty years: this transformation only happens fully when you're standing in front of the actual work. Not looking at a screen. In the room. With the painting.

Most art invites the eye, but spiritual art calls to something deeper within you. When meditation and art merge, abstract painting becomes a language of the soul, revealing spiritual themes that evoke quiet reflection. Join me as we trace this artistic journey through my work, where abstract landscapes become portals to inner worlds waiting to be felt and explored.

Awaken Hidden Emotions Through the Brushstrokes of Color

Color is a language that speaks to our soul. My expressive oil paintings reach beyond shapes and hues—they stir something quiet and profound inside, evoking emotions you might not even know live within you.

The Power of Color in Emotion

Imagine a vivid red that evokes passion or a calming blue that soothes your mind. In my work, each shade and tone is deliberately chosen to create a tapestry of feelings that resonates with your inner self. This isn't just art; it's a

Beneath the Surface: Preparing for Neumann University

Nov 14

As I prepare for my solo exhibition at Neumann University, opening this January, I find myself in unfamiliar territory. I'm painting with a deadline, with an exhibition in mind—something I rarely do. Normally, I just paint, all the time, following where the work leads. This is different.

And it's changed everything.

How I Work

For more years than I can count, I've been creating color by layering oil paint, allowing colors to mix optically in the eye of the beholder as they look at the paintings. About five years ago, I started underpainting in acrylic (quick-drying) and glazing with oil on top, which lets me bury some elements slightly visible in lower layers while keeping others on the surface. These elements were always shapes formed by brushstrokes and defined by color.

People who live with my work tell me the paintings reveal themselves over time—they start to see and recognize things they hadn't initially noticed.  

This layered revelation has always been central to my practice.

Letting Nature In

Some months ago, I decided to let nature influence my paintings more consciously.

Using line drawing and painterly representations, I began incorporating first dendritic forms seen in trees, blood vessels, and neural pathways, and then flowers, branches, and leaves into the layers.

What interests me is conveying the visual cues

of natural forms that people respond to with emotional resonance, not literal representation.

I often say that my art practice is a sacred act, and I'd like to share why.

I follow the teaching of philosopher Simone Weil, who believed that pure, undivided attention transforms even the most ordinary moment into something holy. When you stay fully present to a moment, a task, a person, or even your own pain, you're not just "doing or being"—you're offering a kind of silent devotion that changes both you and the world around you.

We turn noise into clarity by paying attention, turn chaos into order, and longing into aligned action. Every time we consecrate a small act with our full awareness, we're practicing a form of prayer that ripples out into our choices, our relationships, and our creative work.

This is what I bring to each painting—not just technique or vision, but this quality of sacred attention that transforms pigment and canvas into something deeper.

Attention is active—it shapes what you feel and what you choose. When you give full attention, the noise drops away and the next right step becomes clear. In this space of focused awareness, feeling settles and aligned choices emerge naturally. When you focus your attention, you act from a centered state.

The Art of Beginning Again: How Imperfection Fuels True Creativity

There's a painting on my easel that refuses to stay finished. Each time I think I've pushed it as far as it can go, something calls me back—a nagging sense that it hasn't yet revealed all it has to say. This painting has become my teacher, showing me that creativity isn't about reaching a perfect endpoint, but about embracing the courage to begin again.

The Myth of the Perfect Creation

Our culture is obsessed with optimization and completion. It demands efficiency, polish, and neat conclusions. Social media feeds us endless streams of "finished" moments—perfectly curated lives, flawless artworks, success stories with tidy endings. But this obsession with perfection is creativity's greatest enemy.

The most memorable works of art, literature, and music aren't flawless. Think of Van Gogh's bold, uneven brushstrokes, or Leonard Cohen's raw, imperfect voice, or Maya Angelou's unflinching examination of pain and beauty. Their power doesn't come from technical perfection—it comes from their willingness to remain vulnerable, unpolished, and beautifully human.

When we strip away the rough edges in pursuit of perfection, we often remove the very essence that makes something alive. The heart of creativity lies not in control, but in the courage to embrace messiness and uncertainty.

The artist's true work is not just to create but to remain open—to the flow, surprise, and the artwork's own emerging intelligence. The resulting work is really a transcript of a dialog between the artist and the art.

I had an open studio on the last weekend in October. Preparations for the event began at the end of September and completely upended my studio practice. October was lost for painting and I didn’t get a brush back to canvas until early November.

My working studio and practice have now been - for the most part - restored. Still, the break in the routine encouraged me to think about how I work and what all creatives have in common. While much of what I write here can be applied to any creative endeavor, I am speaking directly to painting because that is what I do, who I am, and where I live.

The Fundamental Proposition of Art

Read more here

I’ve written recently about how I’ve been enjoying a daily practice of artwork finished in one day; the exploring the creative process by playing and following whatever happens. While I always try to maintain this nonjudgmental mind space, these little “one-a-day” pieces that I am not expecting to turn into anything that would hang on someone’s wall someday give me more freedom.

So, here I am posting about learning, once again, how I came to accept the limits of my control and learning to be OK with it. It was a troubling and traumatizing time, but, yes, I am painting.

Here is the first painting I have done since returning to the studio

Slow Down You Move to fast

Some tips on how to handle criticism with grace or Don't Take it Personally

A couple of weeks ago I read some advice to artists suggesting that they should identify and write about what attracted them to the subject/object of their work. It advised that in the process they would come to understand what they are trying to communicate through their work. The following day a friend, herself and artist, writer and educator, was looking over my “painting a day” collection and recommended that I write about this process - how working within constraints both self imposed and externally imposed had resulted in this practice, and what this practice was teaching me. I had received the same message two days in a row from different sources, and concluded I better pay attention.

Since then I’ve been pondering what to write and how to approach the subject. Part of the reason this has taken so long to write is because this is such a large topic. I have therefore decided to write a series of blogs.

To become mindfully aware of our surroundings is to bring our thinking back to our present moment reality and to the possibility of some semblance of serenity in the face of circumstances outside our ability to control.

Jeff Kober

Writing on the first day of November and thinking back to the last week of July I recall one benefit to being couch-bound was that I was totally in the “now”. I couldn’t do anything or go anywhere so there was no point in planning. The tyranny of the clock was completely obliterated. The only time I needed to keep track of, was when could I take my meds, and I did that by writing the time down when I took my last dosage. There was no need for grocery lists I couldn’t go shopping, I was totally reliant on food that people brought me (and my gratitude to the people who fed me grew daily.)

The only appointment in my calendar was the follow up visit with the doctor, scheduled for July 31. The physician had told me to go home and lie down and do nothing until I came back at the end of July. I understood him to promise that I’d be healed by then. And so I hoped. I was painting these paintings and slowly increasing the time and distance of walking in my house using a cane, not relying on the walker, I was hopeful. (Spoiler alert, it did not work out the way I hoped but I’ll write about that in the next blog).

Gladys

Painting Faces: Am interview with Janet Boltax

April 15 to May 31, 2015

If you want to work on your art, work on your life.

— Anton Chekov

We seem to be always on the brink of one disaster or another in these recent weeks and months. Listening to the news has been terrifying. It is all too easy to succumb to fear and anxiety. These difficult days, it is hard to not let anger, bitterness and even hate rise and reside within us. I know my response must be one of love. It is not easy to respond with love, but in my heart I know that my commitment to my journey requires me to keep faith and respond with respect and belief in the interconnectedness of all beings.

“Peacemaking doesn’t mean passivity…It is about a revolution of love that is big enough to set both the oppressed and the oppressors free.” ~ Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals

Note: It has been a long time since I posted a blog, What follows was mostly written late March. In April my brother died. This caused me to look with new eyes at my life and everything around me. Someday I will write about grief and living with absence, but for now here is a blog about an experience I had as an artist that is common to all of us when we attach our definition of happiness to some extrinsic occurrence.

I have been meditating for over three decades now, and I am here to say that this has not resulted in walking around in a steady state of joy and happiness. However I do notice pretty quickly when I am creating stories in my head that are contributing to my own sadness and suffering. Then it is up to me to adjust my thinking and release that suffering.

Funny thing, sometimes it takes me a while to give up those thoughts that are causing me grief.

Expectations are resentments under construction.

Anne Lamott

I think all of us seek happiness and wish happiness to those we love. Yet we persist in pinning happiness to achievements and often these achievements are beyond our control. If someone came to us and told us they wanted some achievement so that they could be happy, we would be hard pressed to keep ourselves from pointing out the folly of that plan.

And yet.... we make this deal with ourselves all the time.

I did this, recently.