A customer once chose a hummingbird painting for her mother in less than two minutes from a phone screen. The reaction when the gift was opened was much bigger than the decision that led to it. That is one of the interesting things about bird paintings. The subject may be small, but people often bring
Bird Paintings: Why Stillness Makes Them Feel So Personal Read More »
A man called the studio in some distress. He had ordered a canvas giclée as an anniversary present. The date was four days away. Somebody had just told him that framing a painting properly at a custom shop takes three weeks, and he wanted to know how fast anyone could possibly do it. The answer
Framing a Painting: What Needs a Frame and What Does Not Read More »
In October, a familiar road can suddenly become the prettiest part of your day. Leaves gather along the edges. Trees you barely noticed in August turn gold or red. For a moment, the afternoon light makes you want to slow down and look a little longer. Then the light changes. A windy afternoon scatters the
Autumn Paintings: Bringing October’s Light and Color Into Your Home Read More »
Every Friday for eleven years, Margaret bought herself flowers on the way home from work. Grocery store bunches, mostly, whatever looked decent that week. By the following Wednesday they had gone soft and she threw them out. She wanted the Friday feeling without the Wednesday part, which is roughly the point where floral paintings start
Floral Paintings and the Quiet Problem of Painting a Flower Read More »
A woman emailed the studio about a piece she had owned for nine years. She was moving house and wanted to know, before the movers arrived, what she was allowed to do to it. Could she wrap it. Could she wipe it first. Nine years of living with an acrylic painting and nobody had ever
Caring for an Acrylic Painting Over the Long Run Read More »
The painting arrives, the wall gets chosen, and then somebody is standing on a chair holding it while somebody else squints from the doorway saying up a bit, no, down. Every household has run this scene. It ends with a hook driven roughly where the arms got tired, which is how most people hang a
Where to Hang a Painting: How High and Where It Works Best Read More »
A nurse who worked nights bought a painting for the wall opposite her bed. She had scrolled through hundreds of pieces labeled calming wall art and most of them left her cold, pale abstracts and stock photographs of beaches that looked like a screensaver. The one she chose was a small field at the end
Calming Wall Art: What Actually Makes a Painting Restful Read More »
A woman wrote to the studio one January asking for something red. Her kitchen window looked onto a feeder, and the cardinal that visited it every morning was the only color in the yard until March. She wanted that bird on the wall beside the window, so that the view and the painting could keep
Two paintings can show the same field and feel like different countries. One glows at dawn and lifts you. The other sits under flat noon sun and does nothing at all. Same field, same trees, same fence. Only the light changed. That is the quiet truth about light in painting. It sets the mood before
Locals call it The Witness Tree. It stands on the grounds of Carnton in Franklin, Tennessee, an Osage orange of roughly two hundred years, and most people walk past it without stopping. The trunk has gone thick and strange. The branches twist in directions no nursery tree would be allowed to, so it is not
The Witness Tree: 200 Years of Franklin History in One Painting Read More »
