I was born and raised in Colorado, but I didn't fully understand the beauty of it until I became an adult.
I wasn't raised outdoorsy. I loved my backyard and the small, quiet town I grew up in, but while other people were off hiking and camping, I was dreaming about faraway places. I wanted to see the ocean, other countries, other cultures. I wanted to go somewhere new.
It wasn't until I lived abroad in Uganda that I started to see Colorado differently. Coming home gave me a new appreciation for the landscape I had grown up around. The mountains, forests, rivers, lakes, wildflowers, animals and enormous Colorado skies weren't ordinary at all. I had simply become accustomed to them.
Now, as an adult, I've become much closer to nature. I still don't camp (I'm never going to that person), but I love to hike, garden, learn about the plants that grow here, notice the animals around me and spend time in the forest, mountains, and beside rivers and lakes. I still crave the ocean, but I've found that the bodies of water here in Colorado can provide much of the healing my soul is looking for.
The more I come to love this land, the more I want other people to feel that way too.
Learning to See Colorado Again
For a long time, I didn't want to be a Colorado artist. It felt like everyone was doing it. There are certainly no shortage of paintings of mountains, aspens and the Rocky Mountains here.
But then I started hiking more, and I would come home with photographs that never quite captured what I had experienced. The photos could show me what the place looked like, but they couldn't recreate the feeling of standing there.
So I started bringing those places to the canvas.
This is one of the things I love most about landscape painting. I'm not really trying to paint a place exactly as it looked. I'm trying to paint what it felt like to be there. A photograph can document a landscape, but art can hold memory, emotion, atmosphere and the experience of being inside that landscape.
This is especially true for me when I work in soft pastel. There is something about the medium that makes Colorado landscapes feel almost like dreams or memories. I can soften the edges, exaggerate the colors and let the landscape become something more than a record of a particular view.
I also bring Colorado landscapes into my gouache paintings when the landscape is helping tell a larger story. Our environment sets the stage for the story, and sometimes the environment is the story itself.
The Magic of a Familiar Place
Colorado doesn't feel new to me anymore. And that's exactly why I think painting it has become so interesting.
When you see something over and over again, it can lose some of its magic. The mountains become the mountains you drive past on I-70. The trees become the trees in your backyard. The lake becomes the place you stop for lunch on the way to somewhere else.
But art gives me a reason to look again.
I see Colorado differently now through the eyes of an artist, but I also see it differently because I'm a mother. My son is still young enough to experience ordinary things as completely extraordinary. Fall leaves are worth stopping for. Puddles must be jumped in. A bird or bunny can bring everything else to a halt.
Watching him discover the world has reminded me that nothing is actually ordinary when you take the time to really see it.
I think that's one of the gifts of landscape art. It asks us to look again at the places we think we already know.
There are still flowers here I don't know the names of, stories and myths connected to these lands that I haven't heard, textures I walked past for years without noticing. The more I learn about the plants and animals around me, the more connected I feel to where I live.
Anything can become magical again when you take the time to really see it.
Painting the Memories Inside the Landscape
Some of these Colorado landscape paintings are connected to very specific memories.
Calypso Cascade in Rocky Mountain National Park is one of them. I've hiked this trail a handful of times, always stopping to photograph the falls. I've taken beautiful long-exposure photographs there, but they never quite captured the place for me. They didn't have the adventure, the playfulness, the memories of friends and fellow hikers crossing the bridge and saying hello.
So I painted it.
Rocky Mountain National Park has always felt magical to me. I've seen moose, bears, wild cats, birds, squirrels and chipmunks there, and every season offers something different. Recently, I even found photographs my grandfather took of mountains in Rocky Mountain National Park and around Colorado decades ago. I want to go back to some of those same places and see how they have changed.
Landscapes, like people, change. I think it's important to notice that.
My Dillon Reservoir soft pastel holds a different kind of memory. Mount Quandary sits in the center of the painting, and that mountain is significant to me because it was where my husband and I first said, "I love you." It was also the first 14er I climbed.
But I've loved Dillon Reservoir since I was a kid. You can't miss that enormous blue stretch of water when you're driving up I-70 toward Frisco, Copper or Vail. I've always loved the sailboats, the beaches, the trails around the reservoir and especially the drive around the water in the fall.
The landscape has become part of my personal history without me realizing it.
Colorado Sunsets and the Beauty of Looking Up
Colorado sunsets deserve their own category.
There is something about November sunsets here that completely stops me. From around mid-October through December, the sky can suddenly explode into oranges, pinks and purples just as the day is ending. I don't know if it's the colder air, the earlier sunset or something else, but I look for them every day.
These two pastel paintings came from photographs I took while driving home from the airport on I-70 and another drive toward my parents' home in the mountains.
They were never meant to be completely separate paintings. They work beautifully together because they feel like two moments from the same Colorado sky, and they make an especially lovely pair as a collection.
I think that's another reason I love painting landscapes. A painting can turn something that lasted for five minutes into something you can return to every day.
A Family's First View of the Mountains
Maroon Bells Hike is another painting about a place, but it is also about the people we bring with us.
I've only been to Maroon Bells Lake once, although I've driven past the mountains in Aspen many times. There is something breathtaking about the lake at sunrise. The alpenglow touching the tops of the mountains, the quiet, the scale and power of the place all feel like Mother Nature concentrated into one scene.
I haven't actually experienced this hike with my own child yet, but I painted a parent and child arriving at the view together. I imagined that moment of seeing something enormous and beautiful for the first time, and the particular joy of getting to witness it alongside someone you love.
The landscape becomes part of the memory.
Colorado Is Home
Take Me Home is part of my This Land is Our Land collection, a series of nine paintings creating a panoramic journey across the United States from California to Maine.
Of course, Colorado had to be part of it.
This painting is based on a photograph I took at Steamboat Lake when my parents and I went camping just after COVID in the summer of 2021. My dad brought his pop-up camper, the wildflowers were at their peak, and the sunrises and sunsets were some of the most beautiful I've ever seen.
I have more photographs from that trip waiting to become paintings because those landscapes really stayed with me.
The title comes from the American classic songs that inspired the titles throughout the collection, but Take Me Home felt particularly right for Colorado because this is my home.
I also mean home in a bigger sense.
Public lands should feel like home to all of us. When we see the land as something we belong to rather than something we simply visit, it becomes easier to understand why we should care for it, respect it and make choices that allow it to remain healthy for generations to come.
Colorado's tourism economy and outdoor culture are deeply connected to these landscapes. I would love to see more attention given to sustainable ways of enjoying these places so that loving the land and protecting it can become part of the same conversation.
Beyond the Famous Colorado Landscape
My Vail landscape painting came from one of my favorite fall hikes. The scene includes a family of mountain goats that came to say hello at the spot, although I ultimately chose not to include them in the painting.
Vail is well known as a ski destination, but some of my favorite experiences there have nothing to do with skiing. There are hikes that take you into some spectacular places if you're willing to endure the altitude, and those quieter experiences are often what stay with me.
And then there is Blossom and Branch, which isn't a mountain painting at all.
This painting began with a bouquet of flowers I picked myself at Blossom and Branch Farm in Applewood, Colorado, during one of their "You Picks." Bri started the flower farm in her backyard on less than an acre of land, growing flowers sustainably and teaching people about them along the way. She pays close attention to the health of the soil and works to reduce plastic in the growing process. She now also co-runs her family farm in Minnesota, carrying those sustainable practices forward.
Her work matters to me because she is doing something that feels both deeply local and much bigger than a bouquet of flowers. She understands the systems surrounding agriculture in this country and advocates for farming practices that care for the land rather than simply extracting from it. She's a true hero of mine.
The bouquet I brought home was wild and free rather than perfectly curated, and I loved it. I put it in a mason jar (because apparently I will always be a sucker for a mason jar full of flowers) and it became one of my favorite bouquets I've ever had in my home.
I wanted to hold onto that feeling, so I painted it. It has also become one of my best-selling pieces.
Nature as Medicine
Nature wisdom is one of the foundations of my art practice, and life because I believe everything is connected. Plants are conscious, even if they aren't conscious in the same way we are. Trees, flowers, animals, water and soil all participate in the systems that sustain us, and the more I learn about the natural world, the more I understand how deeply dependent we are on it.
There is something ancient in this knowledge.
On the heroine's journey, we eventually find ourselves back in the forest. We have to remember that we are not separate from nature. We need the earth. We need water. We need food, shelter, plants, animals and one another. Our ancestors understood this because their survival depended on knowing the land intimately.
Some of the spiritual stories I grew up with taught me to think of humanity as separate from creation. My own spiritual journey has brought me back toward the land and toward a different understanding of that relationship.
Hands in dirt heal.
Sitting beside a lake and letting your eyes rest on the water can quiet something inside you that thinking alone cannot. Walking through the forest can settle the nervous system in a way that trying to force yourself to be calm never will.
When I'm outside, I slow down. I breathe. I notice colors and textures. I want to know what plants are growing around me and what animals live there. The more I learn about my own little corner of the world, the better artist I become and, honestly, the better person I become.
Let Art Be Your Doorway Outside
Not everyone lives next to the Rocky Mountains. Not everyone can take a hike at Maroon Bells or sit beside Dillon Reservoir at sunset.
But I think we can bring reminders of the natural world into our homes.
This is part of why I believe in art as medicine. A landscape painting doesn't replace being outside, but it can become a doorway to it. It can remind you of a place you've loved, awaken a memory, settle your mind after a long day, or simply give your eyes somewhere beautiful to rest.
For me, Colorado landscape art is ultimately about more than Colorado.
It's about remembering where we come from.
It's about noticing the places that nourish us before they become invisible through familiarity. It's about understanding that home can be a physical place, but it can also be a feeling we carry inside ourselves.
I want these paintings to be doorways to the outdoors and doorways to the divine. I want them to connect you with the sacred mother who is here to support and nourish you, while also reminding you that Mother Nature isn't docile. She is fierce, powerful, changing and alive.
Every time you look at one of my Colorado landscape paintings, I hope it awakens something in you.
Maybe it takes you back to a hike in Rocky Mountain National Park, a November sunset on I-70, a morning at Maroon Bells or a summer afternoon beside Steamboat Lake.
Or maybe it takes you somewhere much closer.
Somewhere inside yourself.
Either way, I hope it brings you home.
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