The Story
I was six years old when my mother and I moved to the end of Mud Bay, on the lower Puget Sound. It was isolated then -just water, sky, and the kind of quiet that gets into you.
THE PLACE
At the Edge of Mud Bay
I was six years old when my mother and I moved to the end of Mud Bay, on the lower Puget Sound. It was isolated then - just water, sky, and the kind of quiet that gets into you.
When I was seven, I got a Shetland pony named Skipper. He became my best friend. I’d ride him to neighbour’ houses the way other kids rode bikes. We’d spend whole days out on the point together, watching the weather roll in, the tides shift, the seasons change. My dogs and cat were always nearby. There was always a companion.
What I remember most from those years isn’t any single event - it’s a feeling. Standing at the edge of the water with an animal beside me, both of us just looking. Watching the light move across the estuary. Feeling small in the best possible way - connected, grounded, part of something much larger than myself.
That feeling never left me. It’s what I’ve been painting ever since.
THE MEDIUM
Fire, Wax, and Intuition
Encaustic painting is one of the oldest art forms in the world. Ancient Greeks used pigmented beeswax on warships and funeral portraits thousands of years ago. The word itself comes from the Greek enkaustikos - meaning “to burn in.” Molten beeswax is combined with damar resin and pigment, applied to a rigid surface, then fused with heat. Each layer is burned into the one beneath it. Nothing is glued. Nothing is merely resting on top. It is held together by fire.
I came to encaustic because I needed a medium that could hold what I was trying to say.
Paint felt too fixed. Too certain. But wax holds light differently than any other medium - it glows from within, almost translucent, as though the light is coming from somewhere inside the surface. And the process is never entirely predictable. You bring intention, but fire and the nature of the wax have their own ideas. You learn to work with that unpredictability rather than against it.
That felt true to how I understand the world - you observe, you respond, you leave room for what you didn’t plan.
Layers of beeswax, shellac, and pigment build into rich, tactile surfaces - echoing wind over open water, mist rising at the tree line, or the quiet weight of a horse standing still in fading light.
The Work
What I’m Trying to Capture
My work lives in the space between what is seen and what is felt.
Horses appear throughout my paintings not simply because I love them - though I do, deeply - but because they carry something I keep returning to. The way a horse stands at the edge of a field and looks out at nothing you can see. The way their presence beside you is both grounding and freeing at the same time. They were my first companions in that landscape, and they have stayed with me as a subject because they hold the same emotional truth: stillness, power, and connection, all at once.
The landscapes I paint are less about specific places and more about specific light. The low golden atmosphere of a winter afternoon on the Sound. The particular grey of the sky before rain. The moment when the tide is neither coming nor going and everything holds its breath.
I build these images in layers - wax over wax, heat drawn across the surface - until the feeling I’m reaching for starts to emerge. I aim to capture not just what is seen, but what is felt. And I try to leave enough space in each piece for the viewer to bring their own story into it.
Because the best moments in nature are never just about what’s in front of you. They’re about what they remind you of, and who you were standing beside
Where Ideas
Take Shape
In this segment from The Art Zone, I talk about encaustic painting - the process, the horses, and what I am really trying to capture in my work.