@chesapeake_watercolors: Sometimes I just need to paint. To make a sky five different ways. To see what happens when I let a wash run a little farther. To drop darker pigment into a cloud and resist the urge to “fix” it. To add a few grasses, a distant shoreline, some birds…and suddenly there’s a place that feels familiar. These little paintings are becoming almost like pages in a journal for me. They remind me of the places I spend so much time around, the marshes, sounds, dunes and open water of the Mid-Atlantic and Outer Banks. Places where the sky can completely change in ten minutes and where sometimes the most interesting thing in front of you is simply a patch of light moving across the water. I worked on several of these today, and even though they share the same blues, greens, grasses, water and big coastal skies, each one seems to have its own mood. That’s what keeps me coming back. Watercolor never gives me exactly what I expect. Sometimes it gives me something better. And sometimes it gives me something that makes me wonder what on earth I was thinking. 😂 But even those paintings teach me something. I’m trying more and more to stay loose but paint with purpose to make a mark and leave it alone, to let the water do some of the work, and to stop before I’ve explained every single thing on the paper. A few brushstrokes can become marsh grass. A horizontal line can become miles of water. Three tiny marks in the sky can make the whole scene feel alive. That simplicity is what I’m chasing. Not necessarily painting every blade of grass or every cloud exactly as it appeared, but trying to capture what it felt like to be there. Quiet water. Wind moving through the grass. Clouds building over the sound. A couple of birds crossing an enormous sky. Nothing dramatic. Just those little coastal moments that are so easy to walk past. I ended up with a pretty good stack of paintings today, and looking at them all together might actually be my favorite part. They feel connected without being copies of one another, almost like little glimpses from the same stretch of coastline on different days. And after spending the day painting them, I’m already thinking about the next ones. Maybe that’s the whole point. Keep painting. Keep experimenting. Keep working through the doubt. And keep paying attention to the quiet things. Because there’s an awful lot of beauty hiding in those ordinary moments. Thank you to everyone who continues to hang out with me, watch the Lives, tap the screen, comment, encourage me, and follow along while I figure all of this out one painting at a time. It means more than you probably realize. Slow down. The world is still beautiful. #Watercolor #WatercolorPainting #WatercolorArtist #CoastalArt #CoastalWatercolor

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Thursday 27 August 2026 15:26:48 GMT