Cascade Flora & Blueberries began as an imagined room: an old kitchen, well loved and lived in, but also the kitchen/studio ... home ...  I dream to have one day, with flowers and food carried from my garden.  I painted the pitcher, flowers, and blueberries at life scale, wanting the objects to feel close enough to reach for.

The blueberries come with memory. My father grew up on a farm in the North Cascades [Washington], where my grandparents had a large garden with blueberry bushes. The garden and my grandparents have since passed, but the blueberry bushes remain. Still in the family, I returned to the farm for what was meant to be a week during the pandemic and stayed for seven months instead, having coffee with the cows in the morning, walks in the forest,  and baking blueberry pies in the same kitchen where my grandmother once did.

In this painting, a home remembered and a home imagined occupy the same space: something inherited, something longed for, and a place I have not lived in yet but somehow already know. At its first showing, one viewer became emotional and told me he wanted to live inside the painting. I had painted it with home in my heart, and to have someone feel that without knowing its story moved me beyond words.