Tag: hiking

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Learning to see

Cowpath in Patagonia, 9X12, oil on Baltic birch, click on image for more details.

My husband and I are ramping up our daily hiking mileage in anticipation of Britain’s Cotswold Way next month. It’s my favorite way to visit a new place, and I hike for the same reason I paint: to slow down enough to actually see.

We spend a lot of time on the trail even when we’re not training—4.5 miles a day, through Erickson Fields Preserve and Beech Hill Preserve. (Maine, by the way, has the highest concentration of land trusts per capita of any state.)

Country Path, 14X18, oil on archival canvasboard, click on image for more details.

Being in the woods every day can be miserable, especially in hard winters. Then we complain about the footing, the north wind and the intense cold. But even cold days can be engaging. After more than a decade, I know these preserves intimately, but they are never boring. They demand attention with their uneven footing, the shifting light on the ocean and weather changes. There’s no multitasking and certainly no playing with your phone. If I want to stay upright, I have to watch where I’m going.

There are a thousand small events in the woods, and they require learning to see. Right now, the moss is turning emerald green and the tops of the trees are a warm smudge of swelling buds. Almost all the snow is gone. I look every day for the first shoots of ferns poking out from drifts of pine needles and leaves; it will mean the soil has finally thawed. But with that comes frost heave, which means roots and rocks where there were none before.

Path to the Lake, ~24X36, watercolor on Yupo, framed in museum-grade plexiglass, click on image for more details.

Painting asks for the same attention

In the studio or plein air, painting requires the same attention in learning to see. Painters who start relying on what they think they know end up being caricatures of themselves. Painting isn’t about what you think you see or know; it’s about what’s actually there.

What’s actually there is always deeper and more complex than what we expect. For example, shadows can be a surprising range of cools and warms, the combination of the absence of light and reflected color. Out my window the bare maples are are a million shades of blue-grey, with shifting edges and values in the rising sun. Just like on the trail, when I slow down and really look, the ordinary becomes complex and, more importantly, beautiful.

Slow down, you move too fast

Our brains are wired to be efficient, to compress information. It’s highly useful to recognize “Man-eating tiger” and follow that up with “Run!” That might be a lifesaver but is the enemy of deep looking. Painters constantly fight that biological imperative.

Successful painters resist that first read. They question spatial and value relationships, draw, think, look and draw again. They develop the habit of visual concentration.

Seeing clearly is difficult. We all have blind spots; we all fall back into shorthand. We can spend months or years repeating the same mistakes.

Beauchamp Point, Autumn Leaves, 12X16, oil on archival canvasboard, click on image for more details.

An unbiased eye

Good critique doesn’t tell you what’s wrong; it teaches you how to see differently. It slows you down in the same way a rocky trail does. It forces you to notice what you’ve been skipping over.

If you’re ready to sharpen your eye and start seeing your paintings with more clarity, I invite you to join my Fresh Eyes Critique Zoom class on Tuesday evenings, 6-9 PM on April 14, 21 and 28. After that, you’re on your own for a while, because I’ll be in the Cotswolds, looking.

Registration is now open for workshops in 2026! Reserve your spot:

Can’t commit to a full workshop? Work online at your own pace:

Seven Protocols for Successful Oil Painters

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Bells on Bob’s trail ring

Drifts and gusts at Erickson Field (if it doesn’t blow me over, it will trip me up), 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Today is my 66th birthday. By choice I’ve lived every one of those long years in the far north. I like winter; I hate heat. I was born in Buffalo, NY, which means my blood is an amalgam of snow and beer. So, when I tell you this winter has been a unique pain in the arthritic joints, I speak from deep personal experience.

Can you paint in the winter? Heck, yeah.

Little Tree in the snow, 4X6, oil on archival canvasboard, $217 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

About 25 years ago, I set out to paint every day of the year. I was living in Rochester, NY, which is every bit as tempestuous weatherwise as Buffalo. There were blizzards, there was sleet, there was hail, there were torrential rainstorms, there were line squalls, there were those awful, sticky, still, humid summer days that resolve into thunderstorms. Do you know what my take-away lesson was? I never need to do that again.

That doesn’t mean I won’t paint in the snow if the spirit moves me. Can you paint in the winter? Of course, if you dress right. It’s not quite true that there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing. However, my friend Poppy Balser paints outside in winter a lot. To be fair, though, Nova Scotia is milder than Maine. (If you want to try snow painting, my friend Catharine swears by these rechargeable pocket warmers.)

We’ve had a steady snow cover since December and many sunny days, so why haven’t I gotten out to paint? It’s been too frigid, the snow is deep and covers a slick layer of ice, and the wind seems to howl incessantly. While it looks lovely from my living room window, it’s been miserable out there.

We had an awful storm at the beginning of this week, with snow layering on sleet layering on snow. I got a glum text from Ken DeWaard. “I am officially sick of the snow,” he said. “I can’t even push it off the deck.” I felt badly for him until I went outside and realized that the portable garage-tent over my Ford 9N tractor had collapsed. And that was before the 50 MPH gusts hit later in the day.

Baby pine tree in the snow. That’s a different baby pine tree. 9X12, oil on loose canvas.

Bob’s trail

I’m 66 and in rude good health, despite having had three different cancers. I blame this on my lifelong exercise habits. I ran until my first cancer at age 40; I’ve been walking and hiking long distances since then.

I’m supposed to be training to hike around Malta and Gozo in early April. My training regimen meant I should be doing five miles a day now. (All three of my hiking partners are younger, fitter, and possibly better-looking.) But the trails here are deeply buried; over the past week, I’ve struggled to do 2.5 miles. On Monday it took me an hour to push through just one mile. By Monday afternoon, even the dogs wouldn’t go out into that wind.

My mittens, 9X12, oil on loose canvas.

‘Bob’s trail’ is what I call an informal extra loop on my regular ascent, because my trail-buddy Bob first stomped it out. For the past several days, I’ve been pushing uphill on it and then realizing I’m too spent to make the rest of my loop.

Bob and his wife are regulars on these trails. Sometimes they do them on snowshoes. That’s a real blessing, because snowshoes pack the snow down evenly and make it possible to walk in their tracks. “Oh, where the heck are you,” I breathed, as I pushed through yet more snow. And then I realized that they’re in Vietnam, where the temperature is hovering around 70° F.

I guess I’d better go out to the shed and fetch my own dang snowshoes.

Registration is now open for workshops in 2026! Reserve your spot:

Can’t commit to a full workshop? Work online at your own pace:

Seven Protocols for Successful Oil Painters

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Ten free Christmas gifts

Beauchamp Point, Autumn Leaves, 12X16, oil on archival canvasboard, $1449 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Yesterday I woke to rain sluicing against my bedroom window. I hate cold winter rain. I am not alone in that; the parking lot at Erickson Fields was empty.

Of course, it wasn’t as bad as I expected. Inclement weather is almost never as bad as it looks from indoors. When it is, the excitement usually outweighs the discomfort.

Cape Spear, Newfoundland, 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $522 includes shipping and handling within continental US.

I ran into my friend J. She’s not only an avid dogwalker, she’s also a doctor. I told her how little exercise I’ve gotten in the past month; it’s mostly been walking from the hospital parking ramp to my daughter’s room and back. The more sedentary I was, the more anxious I was and the more inclined I was to have a few glasses of wine at night.

She agreed that being out every day in nature is a terrific balm for one’s worries. Walking—which is free and available to almost anyone—is a two-part gift.

Clary Hill Blueberry Barrens, watercolor on Yupo, ~24X36, $3985 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Ten free Christmas gifts for the artist on your list, i.e., you

Given a choice of flying, driving, or walking, I’ll always go with the slowest practical option. I see so much more on foot. The things I notice engage my mind and spark painting ideas, but nature is in itself soothing.

Then there are the physiological benefits of exercise. They’re the best free Christmas gifts you could want:

  1. Exercise makes you happy. Just 10-30 minutes of sustained exercise is enough to improve your mood. It increases our response to serotonin and norepinephrine, which reduce feelings of depression.
  2. Exercise helps control your weight. I didn’t believe this until I saw how quickly my weight rose during my forced inactivity.
  3. Exercise develops strong muscles and bones and delays the loss of muscle mass that comes with aging.
  4. Exercise helps with pain. My mother, a geriatric nurse-practitioner, used to say that people with arthritis had to keep moving. Since I never planned to get old, I didn’t pay too much attention. But science says she was right.
  5. Exercise helps build bone density in the lumbar region, neck, and hips. I’m vain enough that the number one reason I don’t want osteoporosis is to avoid a dowager’s hump. You might be more practical.
  6. Exercise can increase your energy levels. Of course, if you’re daft and you start off by overdoing it, you’ll have exactly the opposite result. But if you build slowly into an exercise regimen, you’ll find you feel much perkier.
  7. Exercise will make you healthier. I’ve now had cancer three times, but it hasn’t killed me. I take that as a win. I don’t have the chronic diseases of aging like diabetes, heart disease, hypertension or high cholesterol. The rates of all of the above are reduced with exercise.
  8. Exercise will make you more beautiful. It helps delay skin aging, and reduces the free radicals that wreck our skin. Clearly, I am the poster child for this.
  9. Exercise can help your brain health and memory, which is probably why I’ve been feeling so scrambled recently. It also slows down brain aging.
  10. Exercise helps you sleep.
Mountain Path, oil on archival canvasboard, 11X14, $1087.00 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

The most important tool for an artist

Everyone else is going to nag you about an exercise program on January 1; I’m starting now. Your chances of acclimating yourself to being out in winter are better in mid-December than they’ll be next month.

The cool thing about walking and hiking is that they cost nothing more than the price of shoes, which you were going to buy anyway. No membership fees, no fancy equipment, no special foods are required. If we want to paint into our extreme dotage, a healthy body is perhaps the most important tool of all. There you go, ten free Christmas gifts. Treat yourself.

Of course, if you also want to spend money, you can use the promo code XMAS100 to take $100 off your choice of any paintings on my website.

Registration is now open for workshops in 2026! Reserve your spot:

Can’t commit to a full workshop? Work online at your own pace:

Seven Protocols for Successful Oil Painters