The Back Door Is Always Open

In second grade, my teacher handed me a box of coloured chalks and pointed me toward the blackboard.

That was the beginning.

My mother Pauline took it from there. She taught me to sew and knit, to design clothing and imagine interiors, to paint and sculpt and believe — truly believe — that what moved through my hands had value. She championed my artistry before I had a word for it. Before I knew what I was doing, she knew what I was becoming.

When she passed, she did not stop teaching me.

I feel her still. In the garden. In the warp and weft of the linen as I paint and sew. In the healing work I carry forward — her legacy, moving through mine.

Fifty Years of Following Water

In college I began camping in the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia. The misty ranges, as far as the eye could see — I melted into them. Painting was not a decision. It was an automatic response to the feeling of peace, of home, that came over me in those places. Trickling streams. Torrents gushing over falls. I hiked and painted all of them, not thinking about why. Simply expressing how I felt.

As life moved, so did the water. Ponds. Lakes. The slow widening of things.

One day I found myself setting up my easel on a narrow strip of sand between the inland marsh and the open bay at Bethel Beach Sanctuary. I felt something I can only call authorship. Not legal ownership — something older than that. This not so solid ground is mine. Sands may shift with wind and tides, but I am still standing here with my easel planted on terra firma.

Fifty years of following the Chesapeake Bay Watershed — from the Appalachian highlands where the water begins, to the tidal marshes and open waters where it arrives — have taught me what nothing else could. How to embody a landscape. How to let it heal what words cannot reach. How to land intact, with purpose.

The Turning

There was a time when I gave all my art away and stopped being an artist.

The silence was deafening. No clients. No friends. No identity. I disappeared.

My dreams became vivid and lucid. I saw my mother. I saw sparks of light. I tried to make sense of it all. In the darkness, my senses opened an inner world I had never before had access to perceive.

For thirty years I have been finding my way through that inner landscape — stumbling through trial and error, distinguishing the terrain, mapping the colours and the flow. Learning to trust what I could feel before I could see it.

That is what I paint now. Not just earth and sky and water. The flow itself. The healing that moves through colour and mark and prayer, from my hand to your walls, into your life.

The Woman I Paint For

I have always envisioned wrapping my colours around my friends.

An embrace. A hello or a goodbye. Be well.

She stops by the back door of my studio for a cup of tea, to chat, to share a project or an idea. We have each walked our own path. Handled the difficult times the best we could. And now we are simply here — to enjoy the presence of something precious.

Time.

The meadow of life feels full to me. Level ground where every season brings its own colours, its own pacing, its own harmonies. No season more beautiful or satisfying than another. This is where I live. And it is the place I am always, quietly, painting toward — for her.

The Studio

I live in Virginia, footsteps from the Chesapeake Bay.

Every day I walk to the river, the creek, the pond, or the bay. I paint in a sunroom studio overlooking my pond — natural light from the east, south, and west. Three oversize easels. Two painting tables for flat work. A palette on wheels that moves about the room. Paintings hanging overhead on double-sided scaffolding. A fourteen-foot gallery wall hung with paintings and textiles.

And beside me, always, Zipper — my gentle foxhound companion, asleep in the light.

The Back Door

My sisters called me Dorr.

You can too.

The back door of my studio is always open — in person if you find yourself in Virginia, or by Zoom from wherever you are. I would love to meet you. To sit with you over tea, real or imagined, and hear what is stirring.

Come in. There is always room at the table.