Season of the Sticks
It’s been an exciting couple of months here. I got invited to Maine to do a poetry reading of my ekphrastic poem, “Neighbor’s House” (after the painting of the same name by Colin Page). Ekphrastic poetry is poetry about art - a perfect combo for me as someone who writes poetry and also does art! Poets can interpret the art however they wish. I tend to enter into a dialogue with the work and spend time in inquiry with it and then let the poem come from that place. The reading took place at The Page Gallery in Camden, Maine, which runs this contest every year at the end of October. This year, they had several local elementary school students reading their poetry, and that was so great! Kids bring a lovely freshness, immediacy, and lack of pretense to their work.
In November, I guided a family nature art workshop at Winding Trails in Farmington, CT. This was a fun experience as kids and their caregivers jumped into making leaf prints, painting with natural objects, and making mandalas and temporary artwork with seeds, leaves, pinecones, rocks, and more. In my Art Journey class, we made “string art” inspired by the artist Max Ernst. We experimented with using the string for monoprinting as well as an outline to suggest forms. I also started exploring some ideas introduced by artist Ann Blockley including using embroidery thread with watercolor. I love Blockley’s bold, experimental style.
My work is inspired by the natural world, and most projects I do in my classes have an inspiration or connection to something in nature, or are inspired by natural and organic processes. Lately, I have really enjoyed making natural brushes from pine needles and sweet gum seed pods (they are spiky balls that you find on the ground). I noticed the participants in my “Let’s Talk Nature” art workshop this past Saturday (at the Lucy Robbins Welles Library in Newington) were using natural objects in surprising and unexpected ways. This is what I love about using natural objects as “brushes” to paint with - there is simply no right way, no right side up, no right surface, which means there is absolutely no wrong way. This really allows people to open up their creativity and make art without worry about boundaries and expectations. I did a bark rubbing as an example, and one of the participants saw a shape in the rubbing and turned it into a person walking in the rain. I love how working with nature helps us open to more possibilities, and how it’s also fun, experimental and playful.
In New England, this time of year, late fall and into early winter, is known as the “Season of the Sticks” due to the bare trees that no longer have their leaves, but are not yet covered in snow. And with climate change, snow has become less frequent. I guided a project tracing sticks on paper and overlapping the tracings to create evocative shapes. This meditative process was a nice way of connecting to the season and to these fallen sticks, once part of the many trees and now returning to the earth. The tracings were beautiful and people took them in different directions. I think this created a kind of stained glass effect in the piece I did as an example.
In my classes, I like to bring in seasonal topics, and so since yesterday was the Winter Solstice, I included a Winter Solstice poetry activity. As we enter into winter, it’s a great time to bring our attention to the subtle beauty of this quiet time of year. We often think of winter as a “dead” time, but if we look closely, we will see that the plants and animals are resting and preparing to grow and bloom in spring and summer. So, once again, nature journaling and nature art can call us back to the present moment and help us to open our awareness so we can experience life in the here and now. What a beautiful thing!
I’m looking forward to releasing a lot of new programming in the new year, so stay tuned by joining my email list, or checking back on my website. In the meantime, as one of my students says, “just keep painting!”
Book I’m reading: What an Owl Knows by Jennifer Ackerman
Owls are fascinating! Humans have been intrigued by them for thousands of years - we know this because of all the owl art that has been left behind.
Listening to: We Can Do Hard Things Podcast. I particularly enjoyed the episode “Women’s Voices so Dangerous they buried them” (November 25, 2025).
What an interesting and amazing take on spiritual women throughout time.
Watching: jasontheween streaming videos. Hey, I gotta keep up with the kids.
