Art therapy theory suggests that well-being can be fostered through the integration and balancing of the differing ways our brains and bodies process information: symbolic, cognitive, affective, perceptual, kinesthetic, sensory, and creative. Painting en plein air inherently combines all of these functions – I’m not only engaging my perceptual function through observing the landscape around me, but my body is kinesthetically moving through, sensorily experiencing, and emotionally reacting to that landscape as I paint. How windy it is that day, how hot, how cold, how frustrated I am by the elements or how euphoric I feel in response to the beauty – all of it ends up in the painting, sometimes literally when I have to pick bugs out of the paint. Painting from life also engages cognition: problem-solving for perspective, color, composition, etc. The symbolic function is maybe a little less obvious when one is painting from observation – but what is a painting other than a symbol for that time and place and my interpretation of it?

Painting outside has been a kind of therapy for me. When we brought my father home from the hospital for hospice care I remember driving towards Abiquiu Lake and feeling totally overwhelmed – it was too big for me to hold or understand. And then I thought, the land is big enough to hold this. A few weeks before he died he told me: I would have a good day if you went out and painted. And for the rest of the year, going out and painting is what I did.

I am grateful that painting gives me a way to interact with the natural world: to witness, to be present, and to have a relationship with the land that surrounds and holds us through everything.

While my plein air work is arguably a top-down process, (I’m seeking to represent through observation what Mother Nature has already created), my abstract work is more bottom-up. I have no final image in mind – rather it is a process of discovery through letting my body, emotions and senses lead. Rather than the image dictating the process, the image emerges from the process. It is an exploration of the interaction between my internal state and the materials.