Traveling Sparks Creativity and Renewal
Available in my portfolio now. Add this proud American creature to your home’s art collection.
Travel jolts us out of the familiar. It exposes us to new experiences, people, and wild places of the world.
This February my husband and I are at home. Exotic as living abroad is, it’s still routine, relatively calm, and full of the day-to-day familiar.
As part of this season, I’m cleaning the studio again and I’ve come across some watercolors from as far back as 2020 that bring fond memories of travel to mind. In this blog I’ll give you some background to some of my pieces that are for sale and which I’ve shown in venues and on social media a while ago.
This week’s Painting in the Spotlight: North American Buffalo
Page in my family gift book describing my encounter with a herd of buffalo.
About this painting…
I painted it as part of a series reminiscing about the wild places I’ve traveled to in the United States. At the time I tackled this piece, I’d only watched a few online watercolor classes but I was pleased with the results. It’s one of those pieces that I still look at and think, “Did I make that? Where did that channel from?”
Look to the North American Buffalo as an example of programs and species which can be prioritized and grown when it could have been lost.
After painting a series of animals seen on trips I began writing pieces to accompany them and created a book as a family holiday gift. At the time, I thought of trying to tell my niece, nephew, and the younger generation in our family where and why “Aunt Marti” was traveling (and living) in so many far- away places. I love animals and nature and hope that the booklet expressed my joy while traveling and encountering many wild animals.
Here is an excerpt that accompanied the watercolor painting of the buffalo.
…I appreciate the beauty of the Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, and much of the Southwest, but I unexpectedly fell in love with the Badlands of South Dakota and feel a haunting devotion to the Black Hills. The place where green and yellow grasses meet red and white earth, meet wide blue sky. The earth reminded me of bones. It’s one of my most favorite places I’ve visited in the United States. It’s a place where buffalo still roam , having been repopulated. Seeing just a small group I could imagine hundreds of their ancestors running over this land. One afternoon, a herd came pounding through our campground as we watched, stunned, in the doorway of our van. What a mighty beast and a fierce landscape…