A Week of Retreat in New Hampshire

I recently spent a week in New Hampshire, pet-sitting part of the time, visiting part of the time, and having a delightful mother-daughter time with Arielle for part of the time. It was a refreshing and restful week, during which I spent much of my time painting and reading. The weather was beautiful the first few days I was there, so the dogs and I spent hours outside together.

Most of the painting and drawing I did was in my sketchbook journal. Working in my sketchbook sometimes helps me be more relaxed than painting on sheets of paper, plus I love being able to look back over my sketchbook journals as a pictorial record of my days. Just like my day to day life at home (or especially when on retreat), the pages aren’t polished or even all that carefully cropped (mostly because it’s hard to get them flat for a photo). As such, my journals reflect more of me being in the moment and in a meditative frame of mind than on the go and externally focused, as I am when I’m out and about.

I always love to see other artists’ casual sketchbook pages and find them inspiring, so I figured I’d post mine here. All of these sketches were done from life with no preliminary pencil sketching. (If you click on the images, you’ll see a larger version and can read the entries.)