What Does It All MEAN?!
When the work digs into your brain and won't let go.
Summer Lesson: Be Boldly Bad At Things
It’s a gorgeous summer here in the Pacific Northwest, and I’ve been trying hard to do more plein air painting this year. I think you just learn so much from it so long as you’re humble enough and brave enough to be boldly bad at it. Like so!
Yes, that sketchbook is very tiny! I’ve embraced artist Leslie Stroz’s concept of Tiny Painting. If you’re not familiar then get yourself to her YouTube channel, stat, and marvel in how fulfilling a teeny, tiny painting can be.
My painting is not good. That’s okay! It doesn’t have to be. That’s actually not the goal. The goal is to just…see. To see and try and get what’s seen down on paper in whatever medium works best for you.
And frankly, watercolor is not that medium for me. It’s far more challenging than most people think, but you really can’t beat it for its portability. (Siri, remind me to write my next newsletter about the plein air oil painting pochade box I’m making…)
To see good tiny paintings, definitely head over to Leslie Stroz.
Doing the Work: My Current Series
The studio work has been full steam ahead this spring and summer. I prize my solitary art studio space because when I’m in it I’m not afraid to be a mad woman, spreading paintings and prints on the floor, writing notes and talking to myself and asking, what does it MEAN?!
I know what it means now. But I’m still working out if the meaning is legible to anyone who isn’t me when they look at my work.
The current work is a direct descendant of work I started in late 2023, a body of work that I called Broken Arrows.
Broken Arrows began from a place that’s been a constant throughout my art practice: the examination of disruption against the steadfast; the layering of interference, examining whether it is constructive or destructive.
Once I’d produced some paintings that felt like a foundation to work from, I began exploring their direction. One thing became clear when making this early work: the work has to evolve.
The arrows have to go somewhere.
But where?
Whenever I’m stuck in painting, I move to printmaking. There’s something about switching to that that unblocks me. Printmaking helps me strip images down to their essence, and that work then feeds back into the paintings.
So I embarked on a series of prints to push things into a direction, and that direction felt like the organization of these chaotic, interfering shapes into structures.
So they started showing up in my paintings.
My Beacon Is Not Always The Brightest Star
Acrylic and charcoal pencil
40” x 40”
$1500 USD
Available
The Rivers Form the Ocean That Our Cradles Gently Ride
Acrylic and graphite on canvas
40” x 40”
$1500 USD
And this is when I started to look like this really familiar meme.
I discovered how the work had to evolve. It had to go from something that evoked chaos, interference, even pain and suffering to some viewers whose reactions I respect and value, to a place of support, foundation, and maybe even joy. It had to go from interference to integration.
The interference does not go away, it merely becomes a part of things.
I explored a couple of paintings but then immediately moved back to printmaking. I had to sort out these ideas. And the series of prints that came out of my studio over the last 2-3 weeks are more legible, I think, and a further expression of where I’m going with this.
Structure / Time 1
8” x 8” multilayered ink monotype on 10”x 10” BFK Rives paper
$265 USD
Structure / Time 2
8” x 8” multilayered ink monotype on 10” x 10” BFK Rives paper
$265 USD
The work has whispered its secrets into my ear, finally:
It’s about the development of structure over time.
It’s about the way new layers respond to the layers underneath it: the layers of our life responding to the layers lived before them; the layers of a landscape’s new growth responding to the layers that grew before.
It’s about the way these layers can form a structure of support and growth over time. Chaos and darkness can be transformed.
More importantly, I know exactly the direction the next paintings will go in. I don’t know exactly what they look like yet, but I can see their shapes and outlines in my mental mist, and I’m really excited to work on them.
Is the Work Available?
If any of these paintings and prints speak to you, they can be yours! Some of them I’m holding back for sale just yet while they inform the rest of the work, but the pieces shared here with links are the pieces that I’m letting go to live their lives outside of their nursery (my studio).
If any of my work speaks to you, the image link will let you buy it or contact me about it.
Upcoming Shows: City of Kenmore Gallery - November 2026
This one is still a long way off, but I’ll be at the City of Kenmore gallery for November 2026 through January 2027! Look for more details later this year, and expect some of the pieces you’ve been seeing in the current series to be there!
Doing the Work
The process is often the goal for me. Painter Brian Rutenberg has often said that when he goes into his studio he’s just chipping away at a giant iceberg, and sometimes a painting falls off.
I’ll be doing more of that through the rest of the summer, hopefully bringing coherence to this body of work that I’m excited to be showing you.
Stay well, friends.
—Caryn
Issaquah, WA
July 2026