“But what should I paint?”
That’s perhaps one of the questions I’m asked most often by the students I teach.
I’ve already taught them not to paint from something they found online, and not even from a magazine—but to paint from life, or a photo they, themselves, took.
In response to that, they’ll tell me they’re not good at composition, and they don’t know how to take good photos, they don’t have time to figure it out.
But each time they ask what they should paint, I answer them with a question:
What inspires you?
For me, it’s travel, discovering different landscapes, and capturing still life. It’s the people in my life, particularly my grandchildren.
But if I dig down deeper; if I ask what truly compels me to pull over on the side of the road, or linger at a certain bend in a trail, or take a particular photo to come back to, it’s not just the scene itself—it’s the story I see inside of it.
It’s the old, weathered barn on the side of the road and the lives that lived there, working those fields in generations past. It’s the stream catching the mid-morning light and the school of fish navigating the current on the way to their next destination. It’s laundry hanging on a line, and the sisterhood of women I imagine drinking tea in a circle as they take a break from gardening.
Something tugs at me, a story emerges in my mind, and I follow it.
This past weekend, we had the joy of visiting my son and his kids in Brooklyn. With me, I had a painting for my older grandson, Nico, to give to him as part of his 5th birthday present. It’s called “Nico’s view”, and it’s painted from photos I took each time I visited him as a baby and toddler, when he’d eat breakfast in the same spot each day, looking out the same window at a view of a beautiful old building with incredible grounds surrounding it.
They’ve since moved, but that scene has stuck with me, and I wanted Nico to have it captured forever because while that building holds a history, story, and lives of its own, it’s also part of his story.
No one looking at “Nico’s View” would know what I know: the particular morning light in that Brooklyn kitchen, the ritual of a small, much-loved boy eating breakfast at that window, the way that building held its own long history while also becoming part of his. That story is the one I observed, and it’s woven into every brushstroke.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe: the moment a painting leaves your hands, it begins living other lives. It’s a window into the world for other observers, and they bring their own story to it. A painting isn’t a single story; it holds a thousand lives.
That’s what I’m trying to give my students, and what I’ve always given myself: permission to follow the thing that tugs at you, trusting that if it inspires you, it will find a way to inspire someone else. Not because they’ll see what you saw, but because they’ll see something true of their own.
I am very excited to have a show starting soon with my fellow artist Jane Turner at the Wood Library Gallery in Canandaigua called “Seeing: Celebrating light and water with two contemporary women artists.”
Details below. I hope you’ll join me at the Opening Reception on Saturday, November 7, 2026!
