I’ve spent most of my life building things that don’t last.
Film sets that disappear into dumpsters. Paintings that get stuck. Worlds designed to exist just long enough to be believed.
And I loved it.
But something changes when the space is yours.
Recently, I worked very hard to secure an art studio. Not metaphorical. Not aspirational. A real room. Four walls. Light that moves across the floor. Paint where it falls. Silence when I need it.
It feels different than I expected.
Quieter. Heavier. Earned.
For years, Skewed North was a philosophy — the idea that being off-course wasn’t failure, just a different orientation. Now it has walls. Now it has a physical anchor.
And with that comes a deeper responsibility to the work.
The studio isn’t just where I’ll make paintings. It’s where I’ll refine perception. Where I’ll question what it means to capture something. Where I’ll explore the tension between control and surrender.
Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned as an artist, it’s this: not everything is meant to be captured.
Some things are meant to be witnessed.
That lesson didn’t come in a classroom or a gallery. It came through a lens.
When I first started doing photography, I didn’t think much of it. I had booked a flight to New Zealand and Australia and needed a camera, so I bought a small Canon PowerShot and went. It wasn’t ambition. It was practicality.
But somewhere on that trip, something shifted.
Photography gave me faster results than painting. I didn’t need to stretch canvas or wait for layers to dry. I just had to look. And when I started using a macro lens, everything changed. You don’t understand how complex a flower is until you crawl inside it with glass. Layers on layers. Colors nested within colors. What looks simple from afar becomes architectural up close. It expanded my thinking. It made the ordinary feel deliberate.
Over time, my photography evolved. At first, I shot to remember where I had been. Then I shot to capture the moment as it was. Eventually, I began to see the world only through the lens. I was present for the shot, not for the moment.
One day in Hawaii, I forgot my camera.
Of course that was the day a whale breached at sunset.
It was enormous and sudden and perfect.
And I missed the shot.
I stood there, hands empty, watching something I couldn’t freeze, couldn’t frame, couldn’t replay. Just sky, ocean, and that massive body suspended in air before disappearing back into the water.
It was beautiful.
And it was gone.
I thought about that whale for months. Not because I missed it—but because I didn’t.
Then it happened again in the Badlands…
We were driving at dusk — that deep purple-to-pink-to-ultramarine hour when everything feels cinematic without trying — and four rams stood silhouetted against the sky. Their horns curved like ancient calligraphy. They were positioned so perfectly it felt staged.
My husband was willing to turn around.
I told him not to. He had been driving all day. There wasn’t a safe place to pull over. It would have been inconvenient.
And just like that, the moment passed.
I replayed it for months. The bend in the road. The exact angle of the light. The hesitation. The decision. I imagined another car pulled over nearby. Did they get the shot? Did the rams scatter? Did someone coax them closer even though the sign clearly said not to feed wildlife? It felt too perfect.
Too perfect to let go of.
So I tried to solve it the only way I knew how.
I’m an artist, I told myself. I can recreate it. I can paint it. I can rebuild it from memory. I can control it this time.
But the more I turned it over in my mind, the clearer something became.
The best photographs of my life are the ones I never took.
They live somewhere cleaner. Unduplicated. Unshared. Unedited. Perfectly intact in the part of my brain that holds wonder.
Photography taught me how to see.
Missing those shots taught me how to be there.
There’s an illusion artists carry — that we can recreate anything. That if we didn’t capture it, we can build it. That if we missed it, we can manufacture it. That the mark on the canvas makes the moment real.
But sometimes the most honest art is restraint.
Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is not turn around.
I used to think my job was to capture the world.
Now I understand something different.
My job is to witness it.
The whale.
The rams.
The light bending around something I couldn’t hold.
They didn’t disappear because I failed.
They remain because I was there.
And sometimes—
that’s enough.
Until Next time…
BUT before I go! Some sneak peeks into my new studio. It is a work in progress, but I am getting closer to opening day in April. I will send out an announcement, and if you're local, I so hope you can make it!
