Snoots and Floofs and the Magical Wilderness

A living blog post about my Dreaming Wild series of paintings, from conception to completion and beyond.

My Dreaming Wild series of paintings is all about the quiet magic of encountering animals and natural phenomena in the wild, noticing the unique energies they bring and the way that energy interacts with the surrounding environment. It captures the reverence and wonder of nature’s beautiful expressions, and the emotion that's stirred in us as the observer.

See what you feel when you view them here! Prints are available where noted.

One still, sunny morning on a camping trip with friends, way back in my twenties, I'd gone to the trunk of the car where our food was stowed to get an apple. As I stood there rummaging beneath the hatch in that quiet peace, our campsite ensconced by trees, I became aware of something to my right. I turned my head and was struck completely still, finding myself within arm’s reach of a gorgeous female deer, watching me curiously. My hand had landed on the apple, and my brain tumbled thoughts over one another. I could hold out the apple for her, slow and smooth (as I'm sure she was familiar with campers bringing food to the area, and had come close purely for this reason), and she might just take it from me. But also it might scare her away, and I wanted so badly for her to stay as long as possible. One of my friends had noticed this little standoff by now and whispered excitedly to the others. No one moved, and the deer still regarded me calmly, and I realized she might let me offer the apple. But the deepest, truest feeling, the one that rose from the still waters of my heart, knew this moment would end soon, and there was no need to do anything but continue enjoying it. We looked at one another a few more seconds – her eyes close enough that I saw her dark lashes sweeping gracefully downward – and she turned and loped away.

What I took from that day was the experience of observing from within a moment. While it would have been lovely to hand the apple to her, what I used the moment for instead was to just be still and notice everything about it. The quality of the morning light dappled through the forest canopy, the temperature and the smell of the fresh morning air, the sound of the soft breeze in the leaves and the chittering of birds and insects, the visceral feel of that animal's presence so close, almost like a thrumming of the blood running through her body. I absorbed every sensation and locked it into my DNA, and even though it happened OH so long ago, I still remember everything. And it's one of the most valuable things I have, something that can't be bought or synthesized by AI, something that contains so much feeling and meaning beneath its surface image of a deer in the forest.

For me that moment is sacred quiet, reverence, respect, wonder, and an agreement of devotion to observing nature for life.

close-up of Deer (2024), acrylic on canvas, 6" x 6"