The wind and my broken heart mending

"The wind and my broken heart mending"

100 x 70 cm

Oil on canvas

2025

My heart is broken. It's taken me a while to just accept it. To say it. My heart is broken.

Having cancer and going through treatment in 2024 broke me in some ways. It fell upon my naïve, airy head like a thunderclap. It floored me. Violated me. Robbed of my eternal conviction that the universe was basically a benevolent place. That the universe loved me. It made me realize that cruel things happen randomly. That suffering is not always enlightened. Sometimes it is just suffering.

And even though I find myself here now, very alive after walking with death so close to me, I now know that we all have death walking beside us. I thought I knew that before, but I didn't. Not really. I know it now. So death and I walk. We walk along the river, up the mountain, by the lake, on the beach, down my cobblestone street. We are companions now. We walk often in the wind and weather.

This painting is the wind. As it blows, heedless of me and you and every creature. It blows clean and strong and poetically, a thing of power. The wind blows straight through me, through my heart that feels broken. It blows through my heart and lingers there, mending the strings of my violin. Darning my dress. Brushing my newly born hair back from my forehead.

The universe may no longer love me as I once believed. But the wind does. The wind loves me. The wind is there for only me. Holding me up and carrying me on light.

The wind and my broken heart mending.

On the date of this writing, This painting is available in my Italy studio.

Favola

"Favola"

80 x 80 cm

Oil on canvas

2023

Mothers don't have favorite children, right? Painters don't have favorite paintings, no? Every single painting I offer up to the world touches me and is a piece I would hang in the center of my own home forever. That is my rule.

And then there is Favola... this painting is somehow my favorite. Somehow the perfect symphony of light, of life, of all things that grow and blow in the breeze, of every story, every fairytale, every moment I have inhabited my imagination. Favola is an Italian word. Like many Italian words, it rolls off the tongue like a little effortless poem. A melody. It means "Fable" in English, and it encapsulates everything I look for when I step into the studio.

Favola is somehow strangely still mine, and it was the most important painting that carried me through cancer treatment in 2024. My home is bathed in beauty and light. I fill it with energy and my art is everywhere. I chose to place Favola beside my bed, and I gazed into the misty green light and lost myself, lost all suffering, narratives of reality. I stepped inside and was saved, over and over. Art is a mysterious thing. It offers shelter, inspiration, reassurance that beauty still exists, even in the darkest of times.

Favola is all that. I love this painting. Probably the most of them all. I know that when it finds its forever home, it will gift someone with an endless, enduring fable. A haven. A home.

At the time of this writing, Favola is available in my Italy studio.

The sleeping blackbird

"The sleeping blackbird"

100 x 100 cm

Oil on canvas

2024

There are blackbirds in the valley where I live in Italy. They are so plain, seemingly so unremarkable, until they cut loose their sweet song. Here, the blackbirds sing in a cacophony back and forth to one another across the valley. They are a constant reminder of all the life we humans cannot know.

Then one day, in midsummer, the blackbirds stop, usually around a full moon. There is a saying here that they go to sleep when the green is the greenest, to awaken again in the golden fall. It is a mystery.

Like most things.

This is the time of the sleeping blackbird. 

This piece stirs a sense of calm introspection and captures the ethereal interplay of light and shadow, inviting you to lose yourself, just for a moment get lost in a lush green world, still under the moon. Life with a beating heart.

It's designed to bring an atmosphere of peace and contemplative beauty to any space.

At the time of this writing, "The sleeping blackbird" is available in my Italy Studio.