SUNSETS IN LOCKDOWN

In March 2020, my fiancé and I decided to pack our kids AND my studio and move up to her parent’s home on the Connecticut shore to quarantine for what we thought would be a few weeks and turned into the good part of a year.
Ironically, the isolation felt really grounding. Her family became ours and life in the middle of a cultural tornado I often felt grateful to be living in the eye of it. As the world stopped and anxieties around us heightened, my creativity became hyper-focused.

I had never painted a landscape and had never before been interested, but something about looking out onto the Long Island Sound every morning over iced coffee from my favorite drive-through seeing the city from across the water, things became clearer to me than they'd felt in a long time.

What I needed was much more simple than I had previously thought, and happiness crept in. So I started painting. There was something magical about the way the saltwater in the air effected the way paint cured and the colors seemed to freeze at the peak of their luminosity.
I became engrossed in capturing the colors of the sunsets. They were more and more captivating each night. Somehow slightly different, but still so comfortably the same.
These reflections, drips, overlaps are just a taste of what I got to experience in those 8 months. I painted one painting for every month I was there. They are meant to bring you comfort by satiating, but also hope by brightening. These pieces represent the start of something special in my life. After darkness always comes light.