This impulse to work less literally from observation—or to take more imaginative directions with recognizable reality—began during the pandemic, when daily walks in a local park inspired me to create landscapes in watercolor. Because of lockdown, they weren’t painted en plein air, but instead from memory once I returned home. The scenes started loosely from what I had seen but were shaped by the impressions that lingered most vividly: the rhythm of dragonflies weaving in and out of my path, ducks in the pond with their tails in the air, or the way the line between sky and its reflection on water seemed to dissolve.

These experiments developed into a steady source of ideas for new work. I explored them further in oil paintings created during my time at the Hambidge Center for the Arts in Rabun Gap, GA—expanding the interplay between observed moments and imagined atmospheres.