February 2026

At the beginning of the month, I attempted to make one digital landscape each week. As with most projects lately, I did not get very far. I really enjoyed this rough piece. It would be fun to translate this into a traditional painting.

February truly felt like it went on and on and on.

I’ve been trying to get out of this funk. There are things that I need in order to make that happen: warmer weather, more time with friends, and making the time to be creative. 

I did manage to have a really wonderful day in the studio on a random Sunday a couple of weeks ago. It had been a long time since I put in any kind of workday with my many unfinished art projects. I hadn’t planned on doing anything on this particular day, but my husband had gone out for coffee early in the morning, got our errands out of the way, and we really didn’t want to leave the house again since it had been so cold.

So I wandered down into the basement and looked around at a very clean (unused) space. I wasn’t really in the mood to start anything new; I decided to chip away at an unfinished painting that I kind of really hated. 

About a year ago, I wanted to practice painting bouquets of flowers. I looked at a few different reference photographs, then roughly painted a layer on canvas. I did not fully hash out the composition, which was clear from the start. Every time I would chip away at the painting, it seemed to get more and more hideous. Eventually I rested the canvas against a wall and there it sat for nearly a year. I pretty much assumed I would just paint over the whole thing, which was no big deal. 

On this particular day a couple of weeks ago, I decided to give it one more try. At first, it was so ugly I could cry. About ten minutes later, it was so ugly that I could laugh. I paused. But then, on a whim, completely changed the background color to black. After that, things started to click. I started filling in more of the shapes around the flowers. I changed the color of the vase. I filled out the shape of the vase so it was less lopsided. I added smaller flowers and leaves. 

Something that had eluded me for so long suddenly became a painting I was actually excited about. And it only took twenty minutes. Well...a year, and twenty minutes. 

I’m not saying this process changed everything and I was suddenly inspired to paint every single day and all of my problems were gone. If I’m being honest, I haven’t worked on the painting again since that last session. There are many elements that have me completely stumped. I may take a picture of it on my iPad and play around digitally before diving back in. I may just scrap the whole thing in the end.

Either way, I think this is such a great lesson that I learn over and over again. Art is a process. It's trial and error. It's surprises and failures. It's a push and pull. Which is why I think I always come back to art.

Anyway, as always, thank you so much for being here! I'll catch you in the next one.