The Nonlinear Path

March 19, 2026

Sometimes, as an artist juggling oil paintings, graphite, and watercolor, switching back and forth between the three media, I worry that I am spreading myself too thin. I worry that none of the work is advancing as much as it would if I were following a straight line with just one medium. I wonder if I should let one go. I sometimes wonder also about the other creative endeavors I pursue when I am not in the studio, such as my daily piano practice, and my knitting in front of the wood stove while my son plays video games next to me on the couch.

As some of you may know, I stopped painting with oils many years ago, when I was pregnant. This was the time I began the moon shell series, and for many years, while the kids were little, I worked exclusively in graphite, rendering shells, seaweed, reeds, and vines.

Then, after a few years,  it was through the gorgeous illustrations in many of the picture books I read with my kids that I became interested in trying watercolors. Oh, that translucence! I had begun to miss color in my work after years of drawing, but I didn’t have time to paint in oils during my kids’ brief morning hours in preschool.

When I first started with watercolors, I tried to create work similar to my oil paintings and my drawings: precise, representational images of botanical subjects. It was a steep learning curve, as the process of working with watercolor is very different from oil painting. But I absolutely loved the feel of the watery paint flowing from the tip of my brush and I couldn’t get enough of watching the paint get absorbed into the paper. Such a sensual, intimate experience! 

But the resulting images I was getting paled in comparison to the vibrancy of my oil paintings, and ultimately pushed me back to my oils - which truly felt like coming home.

However,  I was still smitten with watercolors, with the flow and the process. So I continued to play with them, to see what would happen. And in doing so, I realized that was what watercolors were for me: a way to play and experiment, to use a completely different part of my brain and my creativity. I love watching the paint flow, watching colors mingle, watching the paint do exactly what it wants to do, which, more often than not, is not what I want it to do or thought it would. But when it works, and the image comes alive, it feels like a gift.

My last series of watercolor Horizons came directly from the colors of a yarn combination that I had been using in a knitting project, colors I never would have put together in paint had I not fallen in love with them in yarn first. And when I wanted to try something other than a spotlight gradient in my oils, I am not sure I would have incorporated a suggestion of a horizon line in the distance had I not been painting horizons in watercolor - not to mention the hues that have found their way into my oil paintings, having first been discovered almost by accident through my watercolor explorations.

Looking back further, many years ago, as I was just beginning to find my own voice as an artist, it was the plain white grounds of my minimal drawings that gave me permission to just have simple gradients of color behind my botanical compositions in oil paint.

And now that I have spent the past year fully rendering horizons within landscapes in both graphite and oil, I am very curious to see what happens when I return to my watercolors.

So no, despite my occasional doubts, I could not possibly let go of any of what I do. Each endeavor feeds the other. It is not a clear, linear path, nor does it need to be.