What’s your #1 priority tomorrow?

Arriving at my destination! I’m currently en route to Europe.

Tomorrow is day one of my en plein air artist retreat with Sari Shryack in Almería, Spain. The itinerary is eight days and travel adds a day so it’s the longest I’ve ever traveled without anyone in my family. The Denver to Yellowstone to Grand Teton girl’s trip in 2015 was eight days, Peru in 2016 was only seven days, and my 2021 road trip through New Mexico was six.

But this isn’t a girl’s trip with a lifelong friend—it’s with complete strangers that I’ve not exchanged a single word with prior.

UNCHARTED TERRITORY, as I’ve never traveled alone. This is also only my second time flying over the Atlantic, my first was our Babymoon in Paris seven years ago.

Sari Shryack

I came across Sari’s art on Instagram six years ago, right after I had my youngest son. I was immediately struck by her bold color choices, thick, confident brushstrokes, and her still life portraits with Topo Chico bottles evoked nostalgia for my Texas roots.

In a time when I spent a lot of time on Instagram, especially looking at art content, she and Erin Hanson were my top two favorite artists by far. I love/d her work and she made it accessible to emulate her style by posting step-by-step stories on her Instagram. She’d also post Q & As, from which I still have these screenshots in my camera roll 6 years later 😅.

You can see in the photo below that I had one painting from her tutorials on the easel and another completed one hung on the wall beside.

Upon coming across the above photo, it occurred to me that Sari’s tutorials were some of the first paintings I began after my son was born. This is a lovely coincidence: she’s shared on her Instagram that she became prolific after her oldest was born and she set out to create one drawing a day, which later became one painting a day. What a testament to how sharing your journey with others can ultimately benefit both parties. Though I no longer am a regular social media user, I have continued to receive her promotional emails I purchased her online art course a while back, and I’m now going on this retreat. If you only need 1000 true fans or 100 true fanatics, I’m clearly one of them.

Acrylic Painting

When I came across Sari’s work, I had recently taken David Dunlop’s painting class and another with Dmitri Wright. Both were in oils, but my early painting days when I was a teen were always with cheap bottles of acrylic paint from hobby lobby. Oil has continued to be my medium of choice: I like the slow dry time, mixing on canvas, and the medium lends to a texture that I prefer.

But with slow dry times and the ability to mix on canvas a la prima (still wet), my eye is focused on colors I see and the edges where one item or background meets another. Acrylic dries in mere seconds, so you’re required to layer colors. This, I believe, trains the eye to see depth in ways that placing color daubs side by side does not.

Ultimately, my goal with using a medium outside my favored is to train my eye in a novel way. Being an artist isn’t limited to manual skills: rather, creating art is a journey of seeing things deeply to gain access to new and novel points of view—then, to share those points of view with others.