Hello friends,

Last week I stood at the edge of the Pacific with my daughter, watching the sky give up its color in long, slow bands — and then, further out past the swell, a pair of humpbacks surfaced and breached, more than once, oblivious to our existence, perhaps a mother and a daughter themselves. Being there, with her, watching that — I am so grateful..

I didn't know it yet, but that evening was about to decide a whole collection.

The newsletter version of this story moves fast: three pigments make a grey, then a palette. Here's the slower version. I started with just three — Naples Yellow, Indanthrene Blue, and Light Red, all Windsor & Newton — because I wanted every color in Small Light to come from the same small family, the way the colors in that sunset were related to each other.

So before I trusted the palette with anything real, I spent an afternoon just testing it against itself. Small swatches, one grid at a time, seeing what the three pigments would do when I pushed them toward warm, toward cool, toward grey.

A few rounds in, I started blending the three together until I landed on a perfect muted dark grey — the kind of grey that doesn't read as "mixed" so much as "found." Once I had it, I added a touch of that grey into each of my base colors, to unify the palette before I built anything else out of it. From there, I created secondary and complementary colors, adding a bit of white to each one — not traditional in watercolor, but it gives the colors a smoother quality that's easier to blend on paper. That one small decision is probably the most technical thing I'll tell you about this collection, and also the thing I'm most sure of.

This is where it landed — not a test anymore, but the actual mix I'd be painting this entire collection with.

Once the palette earned my trust, I let it loose on something closer to the real thing — small landscape studies, taped off in a grid, each one a miniature test of how these colors would actually behave as water and sky and light instead of just chips of paint sitting next to each other. This is the stage where a palette either holds together as a world or falls apart into a pile of colors that happen to be in the same room. This one held.

Once the color story was settled, the physical prep began — the unglamorous and mundane: marking the exact dimensions onto each precut sheet, so I know exactly where to tape it off before a single brushstroke happens. It matters more than it looks like it should. It's what gives each finished piece a crisp, clean edge fitting neatly just under the mat, instead of a ragged one sticking out from under the frame. Possibly the part that proves how much thought actually goes into a collection before it's a collection — nobody sees it, and it's the reason everything after it looks intentional. Every sheet of paper this collection will need has been measured and set aside, with a few extra cut on purpose, because Small Light is the kind of project where I'd rather have more paper than I need, than run out mid-collection and have to start matching a mood I've already moved past.

By the end of that week, two things were accomplished: the color story was locked in, and the first two paintings existed — small, and both drawn directly from that sunset. And the newsletter and this blog were created!

I'm not ready to show you the whole of either piece yet — that's still coming, closer to December — so what you're seeing above are just a few details instead: texture, an edge, the way the paint settled. But I wanted you to see this part too, the part most people don't get to.

I'll keep sharing pieces of this process as the collection comes together — not all at once, just as things happen, the way this did.

Thank you for being here for it, however it unfolds.

Natalia

Hello friends,

I went looking through older work this week — further back than I usually look — and found a piece from a short trip to the Baja coast that I almost forgot I'd painted.

It's not how I usually work. The paint is layered on thicker, closer to gouache than the watercolor I'm known for, and I'd set it aside without quite knowing what to make of it. Looking at it again now, I think I know why I kept it instead of giving it away: it doesn't look like anything else I've made, and it still holds the exact weight of that evening.

FROM THE STUDIO

I remember the trip more than I remember deciding to paint this. A short stretch of Baja coastline, the kind of surf that announces itself before you can see it, and a sunset that didn't fade so much as get heavier — more pink, more gold, more everything, right up until it wasn't.

Normally I'd thin my pigment and let the paper do most of the work — water finding its own path, color settling where it wants to. Here I did the opposite. I built the paint up in layers, thick and deliberate, the way you'd work in gouache rather than watercolor. It's a slower, more stubborn way to paint water. But it's also the only way I could get the light to feel as alive as it did standing there, and the waves to carry the kind of weight they actually had — not a suggestion of power, but the thing itself.

A CLOSER LOOK

Two waves cresting against a line of mountains, the sky behind them doing most of the emotional work — cream and blush and a streak of violet, the kind of color you only get in the last few minutes before dark. The horizon is a thin, almost severe line of deep blue-black, which is what lets the sky and the waves feel as large as they do.

The technical choice that mattered most here is one most people wouldn't clock looking at it: the white of the foam isn't left-bare paper the way I'd normally handle it. It's built — layered pigment pulled back and reworked until it reads as light rather than absence. That's the gouache logic again. Nothing in this piece is really "empty." Even the lightest passages have weight.

AN INVITATION

This one has already found its frame — a vintage wood frame, matted, 14.25" wide by 17.25" tall by 1.5" deep, holding an 8x10 original on 100% cotton watercolor paper. It's a beautiful object on its own, independent of the wall it ends up on.

Watercolor and gouache on 100% cotton paper, 8x10 (framed 14.25 x 17.25 x 1.5)

I don't often bring older pieces back out like this, but some paintings are worth a second look — and this one is ready for its forever home. If it speaks to you, reach out here — I'd love to talk about finding it a home.

This is the first of a few pieces I'll be bringing back into the light before Small Light opens in December.

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.

Hello friends,

There's a particular quality to the light in early September—lower, more golden, arriving at an angle it didn't have in August.

I keep going back to the coast these last few weeks. Something in me knows the season is closing before the calendar does. And that quiet urgency—the sense that a long stretch of light and time is about to give way to something else—has done more for my studio output than any deadline I could set myself. There's a kind of superpower in being able to see the horizon of a season. I've used every bit of mine this summer.

I didn't invent this feeling, and neither did you, if you're noticing it too.

The pull toward urgency, toward finishing, toward taking stock—it isn't a personality trait or a productivity trick. It's older than that.

It's the same rhythm every living thing in the northern hemisphere is moving through right now: shortening days triggering something in birds preparing to migrate, in trees beginning to pull their green back inward, in animals storing what they'll need before the season turns. We come from that same nature. Of course we feel it too.

Late summer has always been a hinge point—half harvest, half farewell. It asks two things of us at once: finish what you started, and look honestly at how the year has gone.

Not critically, but the way you'd walk a garden in September—noting what grew, what didn't take, what needs different soil next time. There are still four months left in this year. Plenty of room left to act on what this season is showing you.

 Last light over water · September 2026

These four paintings aren't new.

They're from my current collection, Held by Light—each one 12 x 12 inches, built from layered washes of warm gold beneath quiet passages of water, color, and dusk.

I'm bringing them back into view this week because they seem to belong here, in this particular conversation about the season. They hold, almost exactly, the quality of light we've been talking about—the kind that arrives right before everything changes.

They're available now on my website.

Ten percent of proceeds from this collection go to Adopt-A-Native-Elder (A.N.E.), which supports traditional Elders living on the Navajo Reservation.

So here's what I keep coming back to, whether I'm at the table or sitting in the sand:

Hello Friends,

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what I really mean when I talk about observing nature.

For me, observation is not simply looking closely at the sky, the sea, or the changing atmosphere of a place. It is more about witnessing it fully—being present and open to whatever is there, without expecting it to be different.

There is a kind of acceptance in that.

The weather does not need to be dramatic. The light does not need to be beautiful. The ocean does not need to be calm. A place does not have to offer me the scene I imagined when I arrived.

It simply is what it is at that particular moment.

And my work is to simply witness.

These two new paintings, Where the Weather Turns and Tide Moving Through, grew out of that way of looking. They are part of my current collection, Between Water and Sky, which explores the shifting boundary between atmosphere and water—places shaped by weather, distance, light, and movement.

I find that the same kind of attention continues once I begin to paint.

Watercolor has its own nature.

I can choose the pigments, decide where to place the water, make a mark or tilt the paper—but I cannot completely determine what happens next. Pigments meet and blend in unexpected ways. Some move toward one another. Some separate. Water travels farther than I intended, or stops just short of where I thought it would go.

There is always a balance between directing the painting and allowing the painting to direct me.

The more I work with watercolor, the less interested I am in controlling every part of that process. I want to leave enough room for the materials to behave as themselves—for water to move like water and pigment to settle, separate, mingle, or resist.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons painting and being in nature feel so closely connected to me.

Thank you for following along and for making space for these paintings in your week.