Self-made Artist Retreat
This summer, I gave myself two weeks to step away from daily life and focus on my art. The first week took me to Craftsbury, Vermont, deep in the mountainous forest. From there, I traveled to Windsor, New Hampshire, where I spent five nights alone in a cabin at the top of a mountain. I went into the trip hoping to make space for my imagination and see what might happen when I had fewer distractions, fewer responsibilities, and nowhere else I needed to be. What followed was a deep creative purge and the beginning of a new collection of abstract landscape art.
Craftsbury is a dreamscape. The forest is deep and hilly, lush and misty. Moss covers the forest floor and feels springy underfoot, so hiking through the woods is almost bouncy. Ferns are everywhere, which made me incredibly happy because I have always been obsessed with them. Everything felt softened by the mist, from the trees immediately around us to the hills disappearing into the distance.
We stayed on Little Hosmer Pond, and the water held my attention more than anything else. It was incredibly still and almost entirely empty of people. A single loon appeared every day, crying across the water and diving below the surface before reappearing somewhere else. The trees were strong, lush, and healthy, and the birdsong surrounded us. There was so much to look at and listen to, but very little noise in the way we usually experience it.
Something changes when you remove most technology and human-made sound from your surroundings. Nature offers an enormous amount of visual input, but it doesn’t demand your attention in the same way a phone or computer does. Your eyes can move from the water to a fern, from a patch of moss to the light on a tree, without anyone asking you to respond or do anything about it. For the first time in a long time, my mind became quiet for extended periods. Once that happened, my imagination had space to wander without being pushed toward a particular idea or outcome.
After Craftsbury, I traveled to Windsor for the second half of the retreat. It was still wet and rainy (this is New England, after all) but the landscape felt very different. In Vermont, I had been buried deep within the forest. In Windsor, I was at the top of a mountain looking outward over layers of distant hills. The broader view brought a different kind of energy and made the world feel expansive, even while I was spending most of my time within the small world of the cabin.
I was completely alone there for five nights, something I had not experienced in a very long time (if ever!). Being by yourself for that long helps you tap into parts of you that can be difficult to reach during normal life. When you are totally alone, you are fully responsible for yourself. But you can also do whatever you want. That freedom is an amazing feeling, and one I highly recommend experiencing if you ever have the opportunity. I wrote a ton, slept when I needed to, and painted for hours. With no one else’s needs to consider, I could follow my own energy and let each day take the shape it needed.
The kitchen table was my studio. I covered everything carefully, laid out all my materials, and began working on the canvases I had brought with me. Those paintings are now in various stages of completion and form the foundation of this new series. The misty blues and greys came from Vermont and the heavy, misty, luscious quality of the air. The greens were obviously inspired by the forests, but I’m also just obsessed with green, so they were probably going to find their way in no matter what.
I played with landforms and poured all kinds of energy onto the canvases using brushes, sticks, pastels, markers, ink, and more. I thought a lot about color. I made a list of my favorite colors, and I had already been working for weeks on the palette that is now emerging across the series. At the retreat, those colors began to come together with the landscape. The paintings aren’t literal descriptions of the places I visited. They combine what I observed with what I imagined and felt while I was there.
Having so much uninterrupted time also meant having time to experience and think about a lot of feelings, dreams, and convictions. They are all in these paintings to some extent. That is what I hope people see when they look at my work: depth and feeling, but not necessarily my feelings. I want viewers to find their own experiences within the colors, gestures, and forms. A painting might begin with a mountain, a pond, or the sensation of walking over springy moss, but it becomes something else in the process. It moves away from a specific view and into an emotional landscape where each person can bring their own memories and associations.
That exchange is one of the things I love most about abstract landscape art. The natural world gives me a starting point, but the painting doesn’t have to explain exactly where we are or what happened there. It can hold the feeling of mist without painting a realistic cloud, or the energy of a forest without describing every tree. It can suggest water, growth, distance, weather, or movement while still leaving room for the viewer’s imagination. The landscape I experienced becomes mixed with my internal world, and then someone else encounters the painting through theirs.
I returned home with five unfinished canvases and the beginning of a collection that is now in full swing. I’m continuing to layer their surfaces, adjust the palette, and discover where each one wants to go. I don’t know exactly what the finished series will look like yet, but that openness feels appropriate. The retreat reminded me that imagination needs room to wander, and that sometimes the best way to find that room is to become quiet, look closely, and notice something.
