Watercolor is a beautiful but challenging medium that is by nature hard to control. When the brush meets the canvas, it’s hard to predict what may happen. It offers fascinating opportunities and obstacles for artists who relish the unexpected and enjoy a little wildness.

It isn’t in my nature to get too detailed with illustrative rendering; I might as well take a photograph. A painting doesn’t need to fill in all the blanks and solidify the story. I want to offer places where the viewer can wander inside my painting and create from their own imagination. I deliberately keep some ambiguity in my marks and forms.

Painting with watercolor can be a metaphor for how everything is connected:  where the sky and the trees merge; where shadows connect to form a larger pattern; or a mass of people become one shape.

While studying and communing with a plant leaf or a flower, I feel a profound kinesthetic connection with it – its gesture, its movement in space, how it is connected to the earth. I become it, or I become like a tiny insect, crawling around its surfaces.

My best watercolor pieces, in parts,  seem to have painted themselves. I know enough about the properties of watercolor to set up the circumstances for some happy accidents. Placing a more watery mixture of pigment next to a section that is still damp will result in marks that could never have been made with the brush or a deliberate human intention.

A friend who had been a prima ballerina tells me that I capture movement better than most painters she knows. As a photographer (in a former life) I photographed many kinds of dance and learned to anticipate the dancers’ next moves to capture peak moments.

Painting with watercolor is like dancing with water, pigment and brush –  there are times for following the steps and there are time for improvising. My partners sometimes have a mind of their own and I have to intuit where they are going. Sometimes I lead, and sometimes I must follow.