Meditative Moment Picture a road lined with trees just beginning to turn. Gold at the edges, green still holding on. Let yourself slow down to that pace for a moment. Ox-Bow Lagoon from the dock. I’m home from Ox-Bow, and I’ve been waiting to write until I could find the words. While I was there, I chose to live the experience rather than translate it. This is the first of three letters about that week. The drive was about three hours from Fort Wayne. The leaves were just starting to turn and...
6 days ago • 1 min read
Meditative Moment Take a breath. Think of something small you’ve kept after a meaningful day. A ticket stub, a program, a pressed flower. Hold that memory for a moment. Dear friends, ArtPrize is over for the year, but it isn’t leaving the Weave. This week I’ve been cutting up the ArtPrize event guide, the very map that led so many of you to Monroe Community Church. It’s becoming petals and leaves now. On one piece you can still read “9. Monroe Community Church,” the stop where about 280...
19 days ago • 1 min read
In art school, you draw from life constantly. Still lifes. Botanical compositions. And figure drawing, a live model in the room, a timer counting down, your hand moving as fast as your eye. No overthinking. Just looking and mark-making, over and over, until you start to actually see. These drawings were not meant to be precious. They are practice. They teach your hand to respond before your brain can second-guess it. You do dozens in a single session and most of them go in the recycling bin...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Five hours. Two people. 280 panels on a wall. I brought just over 310 panels to Grand Rapids. In the end, 280 went up. Here's why: as the installation grew, it started finding its own symmetry. The Flower of Life pattern has a logic to it, each piece connects to the next in a way that either works or it doesn't. Forcing the remaining panels into place would have broken that balance. So, I let the installation tell me when it was done. Charlie was with me for all five hours. Every panel was...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
I'll just say it: I am a pumpkin spice kind of person. I love this season. The shift in light, the smell of the air, the changing of color in the trees. This is my favorite turning of the year. These photos are from November 2025 at our old house in Fort Wayne. If you follow me on social media you may have seen some of them before. It was a Norwegian maple. Large and magnificent in the way that only old trees get to be. In a good year, which that year was, all the leaves would turn from green...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
I've been thinking about what's missing. Not from the panels themselves, but from the experience of standing in front of one. You can see the encaustic wax, the reclaimed fabric, the botanical impression pressed into the surface. What you can't see is where the fabric came from, or when the panel was made, or the story behind where the material came from. That's the part I want to give you. Here's what I've been imagining: a small chip embedded in each panel, the kind you can tap or hold your...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
I am a hoarder of materials. Not in a chaotic way. In the way that an artist who grew up feeling like nothing should go to waste keeps things carefully, in flat files and portfolios, for reasons that aren't always clear at the time. Just in case. Just because throwing them away felt wrong.These are from college art school. More than fifteen years ago. They're print proofs from an etching class, specifically from a piece I made called For the Greater Good. I made them on copper plates using a...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Last week I crossed 400 panels. Just over 300 of them are going to Grand Rapids. I've been spending the last week creating packaging to get them there safely. Here's what I built: custom laser-cut trays sized to hold each panel snugly in place, with the panel shapes cut into the cardboard itself. Each tray gets a backer board, layer of glassine paper against the surface, then a sheet of foam padding, then cardboard on top. The whole tray gets taped closed and stacked into a larger box for...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
There comes a point in every growing project when the project starts making decisions for you. For the past several months, Weave of Life has been growing in our apartment living room. My encaustic painting table in one corner, the Glowforge on a folding table by the window, materials stacked along every wall, and Huxtable, my old grumpy studio dog, holding down the one small couch. It worked. The panels kept coming. But somewhere along the way, Charlie and I stopped being able to move...
3 months ago • 1 min read