The Renewal Collection: Honoring Moments of Refresh
Doesn’t a fresh start feel good? I’ve been exploring the concept of fresh starts in my artwork this season while experiencing a (big!) fresh start of my own. My family’s move from Upstate NY to Southeast MN has made for an exciting, challenging, and busy summer. And while the work of sorting, packing, and re-setting takes time and energy, it’s provided one of those rare life opportunities to stop and re-evaluate which items are important, and which are no longer needed.
Detail of Luminous, 24” x 36”
While a fresh start can feel like a blank-slate, start-over-again moment, the reality is that we’re always approaching new situations with updated tools in our toolbags. Every student starting a new school year is bringing along the skills, knowledge, practice, and hard-earned lessons that they’ve been accumulating over their past school years. And every situation we encounter is an opportunity to apply our own learned lessons using our recent (and not-so-recent) years of experience. I know that if my family and I had made the same cross-country move 10 years ago, it would have looked very different as a result of how much our perspectives and priorities have shifted in that time.
Unbridled, 30” x 40”
Each piece in The Renewal Collection had a starting point as an older piece from a previous collection. Instead of blank canvases, I started with previously-finished paintings that, with each passing month, I'd begun to feel weren’t actually finished. The idea to center my early-fall collection around the concept of renewal seemed to fit perfectly with what was happening in my corner of the world. I came to each piece ready to make decisions about what elements to keep “as-is”, and what elements to strengthen with colors, shapes, and brushstrokes that worked better. As with any skill, you’ll only get better with practice—and I suspect that’s one of the main reasons art-making is often referred to as “a practice”. Those skills acquired over time combined with a bit of separation from my older artwork gave me the confidence and direction to create this collection of newly-updated pieces.
Detail of Portage, 30” x 24”
Horizon, 36” x 24”
I’m excited to share each and every piece in The Renewal Collection with you! The collection releases Thursday, 09/25 at 9am Central to email list subscribers, and Friday, 09/26 at 9am Central to all. Which piece speaks to you most? I’d love to hear in the comments below.