So Lightly Here, egg tempera painting

On this day, forty years ago, I set a ten-year goal for my painting. I was in a room in the house that I had built, standing at my easel.

With nothing but a sketchbook, rickety easel, some cheap canvas boards and a few acrylic paints, I set my mind to see how far I could go in this art business.

And as the poet Robert Frost wrote, “way leads on to way.”

No internet, YouTube or smartphones. We learned from reading books and doing. I had started a sign business and decided that I would not track the time each painting took like I did making a sign.

Instead, I would live to paint, not paint to live. My goal was to see how high a level I could take art, if it was in me, and not how fast I could paint. Which I still practice to this day.

As I write this, I am sitting alone in my studio, gazing at a large oil painting of ibis on a much nicer easel, less than 10 miles from that sparse room, when my head was full of dreams and ambition. A lot has come to pass.

I imagined perhaps I would take my art places, but it is my art that has taken me to places beyond my wildest imaginings.

Many awards and articles and successes later, my art has taken me to a dock and a conversation with the Chief Justice and his wife. To an island and meeting two presidents, to celebrities and collectors who have become cherished friends. Art has given me so many wonderful memories with amazing, talented friends. Art connects our hearts.

But it has come with sacrifice; with struggles and setbacks. It has given me mountaintop happiness and deep valleys of sorrow. Like any worthwhile achievement in life, you must never quit; you must always persevere and overcome. Then you will know.

Now, ever since I was a child, I had the sense that God was guiding me. All my life I have lived on that faith, and tried to walk that path. At times, I have stumbled off into the weeds. Way off!

Over the past decade, I have come to understand that it was not my art guiding me, but God. The gift he gave me to develop, painting, I have used for his glory. From the get-go, my paintings have celebrated the miraculous beauty of His creation. By His grace, I hope to continue.

Though she is not a believer, I am grateful to my mom for planting that seed of wonderment by taking my siblings and me outdoors with her, to the beach—to the Florida sunlight, and for sharing her love of reading with us. These were pathways that showed me God.

Art is about seeing and observing. Mine began in fascination when I wanted to know the precise moment a bird quit being a creature of land and became one of the air.

Forty years later, my fascination continues, and this egg tempera painting, So Lightly Here, has emerged from the easel.

Forty years have flown by. For certain all the birds that I have drawn and painted are long gone.

Like them, we are so lightly here.