Tide and Light — Travel, art, and the slow beauty of living intentionally.

Plein Air Painting: What Painting Teaches You About a Place

I once spent two hours plein air painting on a warm pier on the Big Island, trying to get a single fishing boat down in watercolor, and somewhere in the second hour I realized I had never actually looked at a boat before in my life. I'd seen thousands. I could draw you the idea of one with my eyes closed. But I'd never looked — not the way the paper made me, where every guess I made was wrong until I stopped guessing and started seeing, and the one blue I'd carried my whole life fell apart into a hundred passing colors that only existed at ten in the morning, for about eight minutes, in that particular light.