Uncategorized

Up until very recently I would have told you that I lack ambition.  Backstory: at some point over the past few years I noticed friends and colleagues going far, fast in their careers. They wanted to be the boss. They weighed their life choices carefully; their career fully in the mix of determining where they…

It’s white, right? Great – I’m done here, heading home. But no. Examine snow, and you’ll see blues, pinks, greys, purples, and even yellows, oranges, and reds. White, sure, yes, but that only typically makes up a small percentage of an overall snowy landscape. When I stare at snow before beginning a painting, my brain…

My 16 year old stepdaughter, Reesa, asked me last weekend over Google Hangout if I’d watched the new Taylor Swift documentary yet. I hadn’t, and we agreed that we’d both watch it as homework before we talked again. I made a date with a friend and we cozied up on the couch with a laptop,…

My college roommate and friend Diana and I made ruthless fun of the pretentious guy for months after my art opening. “Oh Alli,” she’d say in her Swiss accent, “I love your work because I can see the darkness in your paintings.” “Like what darkness?!” I’d retort to Diana, like she was actually that guy.…

You know that feeling when you catch a whiff of something familiar? It’s there and then it’s gone. You try to place it, but the moment and whatever memory it’s attached to is over. There’s a kind of aching missing feeling in its place, like a dream that you can’t quite remember. I’ve been feeling…

That was click baity, sorry. But I do want to come clean about something. Friends have teased me for YEARS about the role freakin’ Google Calendar plays in my life. When I was younger, single, and car-less in Anchorage I’d ride my bike all up and down town to go from this event to that…

It’s the darndest thing. I’m getting all of these Instagram advertisements encouraging me to “make six figures from anywhere!” or “automate my small business’s communication from this one-stop-shop!”.  I set out to use this platform to write not just about painting, but in a more meta-sense about the process of setting myself up to do…

One morning in December, 2017 I sat painting in my pajamas for five hours straight. I hadn’t intended to paint for that long when I started. I figured it would be like it normally is when I paint after a full day of work. I’d have an hour in me, maybe, and I’d push myself…

I have been writing a weekly outdoors column in the Anchorage Daily News for the past five or so years. For me, that’s a lifetime, and sometimes I blank on what I’ve already written about. This week I went ice skating on the glorious, fleeting natural rink that forms under just the right conditions. It…

My husband Wes likes to tease me about my least favorite “artist” of all time, Thomas Kinkaid. You know him from the schlocky mall painting stores of your childhood. The ones that featured a snug log cabin with yellow light pouring onto the cool blue snow, which also happens to be just next to a…

My good friend and roommate in college had a helpful sense of the absurd. Narrowing her eyes as she took a drag from an American Spirit yellow and sipped two buck chuck from a coffee mug in our slowly collapsing Brooklyn brownstone, she’d tell me all about “the struggle”. We’d commiserate about the struggle during…

Last week at Thanksgiving, my extended family was incredibly sweet and enthusiastic about what I’ve been doing to get my art up and going. Multiple family members – aunts, uncles, cousins – congratulated me on what they called “my success”. I didn’t know what to say. I stammered through a few explanations along the lines…