Get outside your comfort zone.

Painting en plein air has been the most vital parts of my practice and I attribute so much of my growth to it. I love it so much. I saw the biggest jump in the quality of my art when I got out of the studio and stepped outside to paint. There’s something magical about working from life: the speed, the simplifying, the color accuracy vs photos, the freedom & looseness of brush strokes. The overall expression in plein air work is just unmatched.

It's definitely a challenge, but a worthwhile one if you want to get better at understanding the world around you.

I need to do it more.

Observing and painting nature while in the elements also just hits different. The period of intense study and ‘seeing’ a specific moment in time seems to really cement things into my memory. I can still feel the cold starting to numb my fingers as I captured a foggy day at Cave Point in Door County. Or how I felt as I attempted to quickly catch a small piece of nature’s beauty as the sun set over Sturgeon Bay. Or even fending off the 1 million mosquitos trying to capture the correct shadow colors of a rock in the brook by our family’s cottage.