New in the shop this week:This painting was inspired by the Christmas tree we used to have when I was a child. It was a simple tree - no glitter or glitz, no tinsel and just a few select ornaments collected from countries around the world. My parents would place it every year in a large, heavy earthenware pot which would then be filled with and surrounded by the smooth white river stones that my mother had collected in the tails of her shirt (I can still remember the way she would stroke them meditatively with her thumb while she talked). It was not a tree like any other in that decade, but it was my own personal kind of magic, and I would spend hours crouched beneath the fragrant boughs, dreaming of places far away.
This painting was inspired by a small girl I saw playing in the honey-and-cypress-scented hillsides of Tuscany while on one of my sketching walkabouts near the village of Vagliagli.

This was originally sketched on site from a garden overlooking the rooftops of Rome. Rome is one of my favorite places on earth, with its deep layers of history and purely magical light. I spent hours walking its streets and plazas up and down, back and forth - sketching its rooftops and fountains, alleyways and stray dogs, its layers of ancient history emerging through the crumbling earth into the present.