Life In Seasons On The Pleasant Peninsula
Hello, and welcome to the page for my Show, "Life in Seasons on the Pleasant Peninsula", showing at The Box Factory from 10 July - 06 September, 2026. Below you will find links to newsletter/blog posts of all the paintings in the show. each one contains a bit more context, a short story or insight about each painting.
Sunset Over Sunset Hill Park, Seattle, WA
This one is, I think, the only non-Michigan painting. It’s from a trip to Washington state that we took a few years ago to visit a bunch of old friends who had moved away from the area. One particular night, some friends took us to this park in
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Taylor’s Chickens
I did this painting of our friend Taylor’s chickens a few summers ago after visiting. They’re such fun looking chickens! Floofy plumes! It was fun using the black of the chicken as a silhouette. This one has very little to do with the seasons theme, but I wanted
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Over Lazy Waters
I finally got to finishing the last few bits of this painting, just in time to turn them all in on Tuesday. This is from a canoe/kayak day-trip down the river with one of my best friends. At this point on the river, he and his daughter got
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Foggy Trees on Field’s Edge
This painting is from the same drive home as the last painting. The line of trees at the opposite end of the field was obscured by the thinning fog, but details in the foreground were sharp and saturated. The closer tree-line was fun to paint - each successive tree getting
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Marsh Colors on a Foggy Day
This one and the next one are from a drive home after a lovely weekend camping trip in middle Michigan. It was an excellent camping trip. Good hiking, good food, and our tent only leaked and flooded on the last night. The drive home that morning was overcast and foggy
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Enchanted Glow
This one is a bit weird for me - lots of color, not a lot of “drawing”, or precise placement of elements. The color is the real star of the show here. Distant blue tree trunks and muted greens are offset by a scattering of bright yellow leaves, and one large
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Fall Cabin
I feel like often a place really changes how it appears from season to season. we drive by this place quite often on our way to visit friends and play games, and I never paid it any notice until a particularly beautiful fall day made me see it in a
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Almost Gone (Overcast Late Fall Day)
Another good late fall painting. The house and fence are just a house in our neighborhood, notable only in that it’s only really visible once all the leaves have fallen. So like in this painting. But the real focal point to me was the lone tree with yellow leaves
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Light in the Tree-tops
One thing I love about fall is that the sun starts setting a bit earlier, and you get a good sunset without having to wait till after 9:00. This was a late fall day, and I was headed home in the late afternoon. The Sun was already setting, and
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Logs By the Old Shed
Last summer we were fortunate enough to get an old friend of my uncle’s to do a bit of selective logging on the property - getting the unhealthy trees out of the way and making the woods more amenable for the other trees. Over the summer, he got a good
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As Above, So Below (Superior Sunset)
This painting was a lot of fun for me to paint. I pushed all the colors towards the primaries - Red, Yellow or Blue. And a bunch of desaturated grays. The process for this painting was kind of a color sandwich. I started with a bright red tone, painted all the
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Moonrise Over US2
There’s a stretch of US 2 that runs through the U.P., along the upper end of Lake Michigan. Usually We drive along this route during the late morning or early afternoon. This particular time, we happened to be passing through at about sunset, with the moon having just
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Sunset Fields 2
Well as it turns out I took the picture for yesterday’s newsletter and then forgot to write it. So here’s the painting from yesterday, today. This one is the second in the walk down the road at sunset series. Honestly I’m not sure what to say about
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Sunset Fields 1
This is one of two paintings painted from refrence taken on a walk down the road at my grandfather’s house at sunset. Something about the raking light hitting the trees and fields, combined with the fun stuff the clouds in the sky were doing really made for an excellent
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I’m Just A Tangle In These Trampled Weeds
I should probably talk about the composition of this painting, but I mostly just want to talk about what I titled the painting. So I’m gonna do that instead. This painting is of a bit of the scene from the painting “From the Sauna Door”, from my grandfather’s
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Shadows Lengthen
There’s this little boulevard of trees that separates one of the fields up at my grandfather’s house from the neighbor’s fields. Two lines of parallel trees that farmers past pushed any rocks they plowed up in the fields up against. In the summer heat, the sheep huddle
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From the Sauna Door
Here’s another one from The U.P. It’s been pointed out to me that I enjoy working doors as a compositional device into paintings. They’re so good at framing a subject. I like this one for the half landscape/half interior that it presents. Rought woods and
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Lights at Dusk
This painting is of my grandfather’s house, silhouetting the sunset, with a few lights on inside. I like this painting primarily for the sense of light it gives. That was my primary goal when creating the painting. I love how restricting most of the light values in a painting
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Whorls and Swirls
I’ve got one more summer painting to post, but I’ve got a bit of work to do on the last one, and I haven’t had time to do the work yet. So We’re moving on to some Upper Peninsula paintings (they’re almost all summer paintings
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Leaves, Water & Reflections
There are some paintings that I’m including in the show that are - objectively - probably not anything special. But I love them. This is one of them. There’s not really a focus - nothing that the eye immediately gravitates to. But the vibes are there. At least for me. It
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Summer Repose (Hannah & Alva)
This is one of my favorite paintings I created last year. It’s smaller than I usually start, and I used the smaller size as a justification for stuffing a bit more high-chroma color into it than I would ordinarily. I love painting bright colors, but usually I go
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For The Birds
We were just gonna make our pick-up for our CSA box before closing. The sun was starting to think about setting. We got in, got our box, and were headed down the long driveway out, when I saw this scene. Ducks, wandering along the perimeter of the lines of
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As Above, So Below (Superior Sunset)
This painting was a lot of fun for me to paint. I pushed all the colors towards the primaries - Red, Yellow or Blue. And a bunch of desaturated grays. The process for this painting was kind of a color sandwich. I started with a bright red tone, painted all the
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Captured Light & Cast Shadows
One of my personal favorite things to paint is the little liminal moments that are so difficult to notice in the normal every-day stream of life. In fact, it’s possibly one of my favorite things about painting that it allows you to see things in your life differently.
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Spring Daffodil Plein-air Sketch
I painted this quick sketch as my first plein-air sketch this spring. I got my stuff together and walked out into the yard to the first few daffodils of the season on the first properly warm day of the year. I picked three daffodils at good angles to relate
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Apple Blossoms
I did this sketch early this spring. Apple blossoms are such a transitory thing - the space of time between when I see that they’re out and when they disappear is near instantaneous. This year I happened to have my phone out at the right time, and snapped a few
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Snow on A Winter Backroad
This painting is one of my favorite paintings that I’ve made in the last year or so. Largely because it’s a bit different than my usual. Generally my paintings are pretty colorful... I think that’s one thing that really drew me to this scene - it’s so
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Winter Morning Sunrise
This view is often one of the first I see in the morning. I wake up, get out of bed, wander into the kitchen and proceed to get hot water going for tea or coffee. This view happens to be view through the window over our kitchen sink. Some days,
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Last Year’s Crops
I just spent the last ten minutes writing up a thing about this painting, only to look back at what I originally wrote about it when I painted it back in February. Guess what?! It was the exact same thing, only not quite as good... So I deleted it and
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Morning Frost
I had the day off in early February a few years back, and decided to visit one of my favorite places to paint outdoors. Not to go out and paint this time, mind you. It was a calmer winter that year but there was still frost on the grass, and
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After the First Snowfall
The snow came a bit earlier than expected that year. I had planned to bike into work that day, but the roads were all slush so I brewed an extra thermos of tea, put on my best foul-weather boots, and budgeted an extra 30 minutes to walk in. Ordinarily
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Twilight Barn
Driving back country roads at dusk is a genuinely beautiful feeling. There’s something about the way the fading light really simplifies the tones. Everything turns golden, then red, then blue. The snow really added to the value pattern as well - usually the foreground cornfield would be all dark as
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I Thought it was Funny, so I Painted It...
I officially started my blog/newsletter on June 1st of last year. That means I’ve been doing this for a whole year now. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, or if I wanted to change anything for year two. And I realized that I
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