Milk and Honey Day 27: Why Landscapes

Having mild ADHD, I love painting a wide variety of things. It can be difficult to pick a lane and stay in it. Some people see that as a strength and others a weakness. Personally, I've never put much stock in the idea that artists need to choose one subject and spend their entire career painting variations of it.

None of my favorite artists worked that way.  Even famous artists don't always like to be pigeon-holed that way.

Van Gogh painted portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and florals. Frida Kahlo is remembered for her self-portraits, but she also painted flowers, animals, still lifes, and symbolic works. Picasso reinvented himself so many times that entire periods of his career have their own names. Most artists I admire followed their curiosity wherever it led them rather than worrying about whether they were staying inside a carefully defined category.

I've always been the same way.

I like learning new things. I like experimenting. I like chasing ideas and seeing where they go. Some times that has meant florals. Others it has meant mixed media explorations, symbolic work, still lifes, or illustration.

And yet, when I look back across everything I've created, two subjects keep appearing over and over again.

Florals.

Landscapes.

Not because I've forced them into every collection, but because they seem to be the visual language I naturally return to when I'm trying to say something that matters.

For me, both are rooted in the same thing.

Growth.

A flower isn't interesting because it's pretty. It's interesting because it's alive. It changes. It unfolds. It responds to its environment. It survives storms, droughts, neglect, and sometimes impossible odds.

Landscapes do the same thing on a larger scale.

Rivers carve new paths.

Fields move through seasons.

Trees grow slowly enough that we rarely notice until years have passed.

Storms reshape things.

Time reshapes things.

Nothing stays exactly the same.

I think that's why they've become such a natural fit for my work. Most of what I'm interested in painting isn't really about objects. It's about transformation. It's about hope. It's about what happens when something is given enough time, care, faith, or grace to become what it was meant to be.

That's certainly true of Milk and Honey.

The collection may be filled with bees, wheat, rivers, flowers, waterfalls, vineyards, and lemon trees, but underneath all of those symbols is the same idea: life is always becoming something.

Maybe that's why landscapes feel so much like home to me.

They're constantly changing, and somehow they're still recognizably themselves.