Right now, I am experimenting with just how much paint is actually needed over a sketchy drawing.

Wolf Study II is, in many ways, a return to the way I began creating art. I see myself in this painting. I see the many, many hours I used to spend creating intricate drawings of my subjects. I wanted spareness. I wanted detail where it mattered. I wanted the eyes.

As I learned to paint, I gradually let my drawings move backstage. I learned to let the paint describe my subjects, and somewhere along the way, I left behind something I had always loved.

I rediscovered that lost love with this study. You see, I really love the drawing.

I want to see it. And in it, I want to see me.

In this painting, letting the marks remain visible, being willing to leave some things unresolved, and letting the viewer complete them felt so right. I am going to explore these ideas more, and see where those explorations take me. This is going to be fun!

There came a horse at midnight's hour,
A shadow crowned with mane,
That fled beneath the starless sky
As though it fled from pain.

I watched him pass the midnight veil,
A phantom pale and fleet.
What could have driven him so far,
What followed at his feet?

Perhaps he fled the moonless grave,
Perhaps the dead had stirred,

Or worse, perhaps he fled himself,
From something left unheard.

Then darkness closed upon his path,
The hoofbeats ceased at last,
And where the horse had thundered through,
There lay the silence vast.

Yet still, when night descends upon
The fields beyond my door,

I hear a hoof upon the earth,

And then I hear no more.

Art of the American West

Innocence and Alces Borealis Forma will ship out soon, headed to The Centerpiece Gallery in Raleigh, North Carolina, where the jury for Limitless, an international art show, selected both for this year's event.

Getting a painting ready to travel is its own kind of work. Tom has built the frames out of black walnut boards that my family has held onto for over five decades. I don't send paintings out in temporary frames; the frame a collector receives is the one meant to hang. Each piece travels with a signed certificate of authenticity on the back, and because I paint on Sierra Art Panels, even the back of the painting is beautiful to look at, and it doesn't get hidden away under framing materials.

The show runs October 9 through November 6. If you're anywhere near Raleigh this fall, I'd love for you to stop in and see the paintings in person.

July was a productive month in the studio. Second Sight was started and finished, along with major work on a large moody horse painting (tune in next month to see it finished), and finishing touches and work on a number of other paintings.

I have summer heat to thank for it.

For years, my summers meant packing up and driving east to our little lake cabin in northern Wisconsin where I grew up. RozieMay, our golden retriever and I would gather our art supplies and favorite stuffed toys, and of course the kayaks, and we'd head out together, with Tom usually joining us later in the season. RozieMay and I used to joke that we were like Thelma and Louise. The tame version -- no guns, no cliff, just two road-trippers headed for the water.

Finally the cross-country haul got to be too much, and last year, with heavy hearts and regrets, we sold the cabin. Now summer means California. Hot, dry, and primarily indoor-bound.

It turns out that's very good for output. When the studio is the coolest room in the house, the paintings pile up.

Lemons into lemonade.

Two paintings are leaving the studio this month for the Art in the West exhibition at the High Desert Museum in Bend, Oregon. The show runs from July 18 through October 2, and these and many other works of art will be auctioned to support the Museum and its programs.  DNA and Little White Dove are two very different paintings, but ones I am proud to send out into the world together.

DNA

Two ravens share a branch, one calling upward, feathers ruffled with urgency; the other silent and listening below. The exchange between them is charged with something that feels both like instinct and thought.

But the painting holds a second message. The arc of the branch, the opposing postures of the birds, the spiral of the composition itself - all echo the double helix, that elegant, coiled architecture at the center of every living thing. Ravens mate for life. They grieve, remember, and reason in ways that feel close to our own. It seemed right that they should carry the idea that what binds two creatures together: loyalty, memory, recognition, is not incidental. It is written into the molecule itself.

Little White Dove

The face fills the canvas - close enough that there is nowhere else to look. White fur, warm with ochre and shadow, horns curved against a subdued gray ground, and two dark eyes that hold nothing you could name and everything you can feel. This animal is not performing. It simply is.

White bison are rare, and to many Native American peoples, sacred. I painted this with the full weight of what that means: what was taken from the bison, and from the people whose lives and cultures were bound to them, by people who looked like me. I arrived two centuries too late to have had any part in it, but that doesn't help. Some things you inherit whether you chose to or not, and that inheritance sits in this work.

If you are in or traveling through the Bend area this summer, I hope you will stop in. The High Desert Museum is a remarkable place, and I would love for these paintings to be seen by people who love that country as much as I do.

Early last month, I watched a documentary on Rembrandt van Rijn. Of all the old masters, his work has always drawn me in. The depth of his shadows, the drama of his lighting, and the way his subjects seem to emerge from darkness rather than simply sitting within it. It led me to ask a practical question: how can I bring some of that sensibility into my own wildlife paintings?

From there, my thoughts moved to William-Adolphe Bouguereau. The two seem like an unlikely pairing, with one shadowed and earthbound, the other luminous and highly finished. Yet studying them side by side revealed something important: beneath those differences, they share a disciplined approach to building a painting through layers. That realization sent me deeper, into Turner, into Bierstadt, both of whom used transparent color to create light that feels as though it exists within the painting rather than on its surface.

What surprised me was how rarely this structured, layered approach appears in wildlife painting today. Most contemporary wildlife work leans toward direct painting techniques, which leaves an interesting opportunity: applying classical layering methods to wildlife subjects.

I began experimenting.

For Innocence, I started with drybrush to establish form and background, then returned with glazes. First building atmosphere in the background, then working back into the fawn with thin, transparent layers of color.  One material choice became important: flake white. Titanium white is strong and opaque but can produce a flat or chalky result. Flake white is softer, slightly warmer, and more translucent - used in successive layers, it creates depth and a more natural transition into light.

A few principles clarified as I worked. Separating structure from finish matters enormously, and establishing a clear value foundation before glazing creates a stable framework, closer to how Rembrandt allowed light to emerge convincingly from shadow. Direction matters too: in the background, glazes remain soft and diffused; within the animal, they follow form deliberately. Selectively reintroducing semi-opaque layers afterward by scumbling, brings light forward again. And edges do a great deal of the work, with some dissolving into atmosphere and others held firm to keep the animal present and grounded.

All of this connects with the direction my work has already been taking. I create atmospheric backgrounds that suggest rather than describe, and animals that emerge with presence rather than sitting in front of a scene. These classical techniques give me a more structured way to achieve that effect.

This is will be an evolving process. What I'm working toward is a method that combines anatomical accuracy, atmosphere, and intensity: drawing from the old masters while remaining true to the subjects that inspire me. I'll continue refining in upcoming paintings, reaching not just for how an animal looks, but for how it feels to encounter one.

Thank you for being here and for caring about my work - it's what keeps the studio lights on.

All the best,

Sandra