Opening Note

A question has been sitting with me for the past week: what if I unlearned everything I know about art — about making it, about presenting it, about all the ways I've decided a painting should look or behave — starting with watercolor, the technique I know best? Not technique as skill, but technique as the quiet list of rules I've absorbed without ever agreeing to them. This week's letter follows that questioning — that small rebellion — toward whatever it discovers.

From the Studio

Expectation is sneaky. It doesn't announce itself as a rule — it shows up as a preference, a habit, a way you've always followed, until "always" quietly becomes "should." Unlearning means noticing where those shoulds have settled in, and setting one down at a time. The substrate can be anything — paper, canvas, wood, cardboard — and still hold the painting. Color doesn't have to behave. Form doesn't have to resolve into something recognizable.

This is where discovery actually lives — not in the plan, but in the space that opens up once the plan is gone. Creativity, at its most honest, is the willingness to make something before you know what it is.

A Closer Look

I went looking through older work for proof that I'd already done this once, and found it in four watercolors from 2023 — large pieces, 22x30, of sky meeting sea. Looking at them now, the freedom is unmistakable: no fixed horizon, no tidy resolution between water and air, color allowed to bleed past where a careful hand would have stopped it. They're quieter than most of what I make, and stranger, and I like them more for both.

This isn't a new instinct. Turner spent his last years painting weather and light so loosely dissolved that his contemporaries called it carelessness rather than vision. A few decades later, the Impressionists were mocked with the very word now used to celebrate them. Letting go of expectation has never been a comfortable position to paint from — it's rarely recognized as vision in the moment it happens.

An Invitation

I want to close this letter with the piece that feels most like this idea already in motion — an acrylic on canvas, 30x46, of a horse, painted with none of the caution I usually bring to a subject that could so easily turn sentimental. It's the least explainable piece I've made, and that's exactly why it belongs here.

I'd love to hear from you: is there a rule in your own work or life — spoken or unspoken — you're ready to set down? Leave a comment below, or reply to this letter directly.

Opening Note

Last week I wrote about an old exercise I keep returning to — ten brush strokes, no more. Once the brush lifts, that stroke is spent. Whatever the hand decides in that moment is the painting. I called it a discipline of restraint, something I practice mostly in private, on studies I don't always keep and rarely show anyone.

This week, without planning it, that same restraint showed up somewhere I didn't expect: in an actual finished piece. Not a study. Something meant to be seen.

From the Studio

A single bird, and a great deal of open water. Most of the paper here is empty, and that's the point — the bird only reads at that scale if nothing else is asking to be looked at. Add weather, add detail, and the space stops being large.

So I left the sky alone. No smoothing. No second pass. No chasing the edges back into place. It dried the way it wanted to.

A Closer Look

I've been sitting with why this one felt different from the studies I don't photograph. The ten-stroke exercise lives in private — I do it to remember what happens when I stop managing every inch of the paper, and most of what comes out of it stays mine. This is the first time I let that same discipline finish something meant to leave the studio.

The hard part wasn't restraint on the page. It was resisting the urge to go back in once the piece was already finished and "help" it — to add a wave, a texture, a reason for all that emptiness. The bird doesn't need a reason. Neither does the water around it.

An Invitation

This is the first Studio Notes issue I'm also posting here, on the blog — and that means, for the first time, there's a place to leave a comment publicly if something here makes you want to respond.

A few of you have told me you wanted somewhere to do that. So here it is: if this brought up a stroke you'd add, one you'd never dare skip, or just a thought about restraint in your own life, I'd love to read it in the comments below.

A short letter like this one goes out from the studio every Saturday morning. Link in the bio, or on the newsletter page, if you'd like it in your inbox too.

Opening Note

I came back to an old exercise this week. I call it 10 Brush Strokes — a discipline I return to when I want to remember what happens when I stop managing every inch of the paper.

The rule is almost nothing: ten strokes, no more. Once the brush lifts, that stroke is spent. There is no room left for fixing, softening, or adding "just one more pass." Whatever the hand decides in that moment is the painting.

From the Studio

I wet the paper through, completely, before I touched any pigment. One color only — Neutral Tint by Winsor & Newton has been my favorite for a long time now, a blue with the exact weight of a storm cloud in it.

Two darker strokes at the top, for the density of the sky. Then whatever paint was left on the brush, I drew across the lower half — a soft, unplanned horizon between sky and a still sea.

After that, I did nothing. I let the clouds bloom on their own. I let the sea melt into the paper however it wanted to. I let the pigment dry rough — no smoothing, no correcting, no chasing the edges back into place. Untamed. Unfinished, in the way something is only unfinished if you believe it needed more.

It dried. It matured on its own terms. It became something I hadn't drawn so much as allowed.

A Closer Look

This is the part of the process that's usually invisible — the ten minutes between a blank, water-soaked sheet and a finished piece, where almost none of the "work" is actually doing anything. Once the strokes are laid down, the only skill left is restraint: the discipline of not touching it again.

I didn't photograph what it became. That one stays mine.

An Invitation

Ten strokes is a strange kind of freedom. Most days, painting is a hundred small acts of control — mixing, checking, adjusting, deciding again. This exercise removes almost all of that, and what's left over is closer to trust than technique.

I've been wondering where else that might apply. Not as a metaphor exactly — more as an honest question. Where in my own life might I set a limit like this, on purpose, just to see what happens when I stop managing every inch of it? A conversation I let unfold instead of steering. A plan I leave rougher than I'd normally allow. A day I let end without smoothing over its edges.

I don't have an answer for how it translates yet. I'm not sure it's supposed to translate cleanly. But if you try a version of it this week — in the studio or out of it — I'd love to hear what you noticed in the comments below.

A short letter like this one goes out from the studio every Saturday morning. Link in the bio, or on the newsletter page, if you'd like it in your inbox too.