Turtledove Painting

Growing up, our home was a small museum of inherited canvases, the walls layered with the work of three generations before me. I am the fourth link in that chain. My mother was exhibiting her art before I was born, and the rest of my family seemed to live with paint on their hands—artists, craftsmen, and teachers whose stories were told in color rather than words. Trees and flowers became my first companions on paper. Their shapes and rhythms taught me how to see, long before I began drawing figures in after‑school studios and later in art college. My work drifts toward a whimsical world—mystical, slightly unreal, and charged with a quiet, magical atmosphere. Traditional training gave me a sturdy backbone: I learned how to catch a fleeting idea, hold it still for a moment, and patiently develop it into a finished image. After college, I spent nearly a decade in conversation with the European masters—Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch—copying their works stroke by stroke to understand not just what they painted, but how they felt. In 2013, my family and I moved from Northern Europe to Portland, Oregon, and the landscape rewrote my palette. The mossy greens, silver light, and rain‑softened edges of local parks seeped into my work. At local folk festivals, I met musicians who looked as if they had stepped out of a Renaissance painting, their instruments and costumes echoing an older world. Later, in Paris, I discovered medieval tapestries—dense, symbolic, and dreamlike—which nudged my work toward a kind of medieval expressionism. Today I continue to return to my favorites: the Post‑Impressionists and Expressionists whose bold colors and emotional lines feel like old friends. I paint landscapes that blur memory and observation, and I sketch local musicians as they play, trying to catch the movement of sound in charcoal and ink. Together, these practices form the rhythm of my studio life—ways of seeing and re‑seeing the world that keep me curious, rooted, and endlessly inspired.