Memories of Mornings by the Studio Window Painting Data Collection

August 25, 2026August 25, 2026 / Terrill Welch / Leave a comment

Painting Data Collection

Title: Memories of Mornings by the Studio Window	Date Completed: Wednesday, 19 August 2026
Materials: Acrylic on linen board	Size: 8 x 10 inches (25.4 x 20.32 cm)

Figurative/Abstract Self Assessment Band-Scale Rating between 1-10: 5

This work is a quick impressionist study. Attention has been paid to light, relationships between elements and sensory records of the fragrance of dark coffee, fresh morning air through an open window and the softens of wool socks cozying around bare feet sticking out from under the edge of a blanket.

Reference Gathering:

References for this study are minimal with most mark making relying on repeated mornings of similar moments that created a bank of memories.

But there are two images that provide a starting point.

Sun catching the hill as seen from the chair beside the studio window. Photograph by Terrill Welch Sunday 28 June 2026.

Mornings in the chair of the studio window. Photograph by Terrill Welch Sunday 28 June 2026.

Making Process:

The making process is equally sparse because once I settled down to paint, I forgot to take many photographs as the work developed. But there are a few.

Work-in-progress collage of images for Memories of Mornings by the Studio Window by Terrill Welch, 10 x 8 inch acrylic on linen board.

Finished Painting:

Memories of Mornings by the Studio Window by Terrill Welch, 10 x 8 inch acrylic on linen board. Completed Wednesday, 19 August 2026.

Making Notes:

So many mornings seated in the studio window with coffee and breakfast just like this morning. I worked from memory though there are references. My attention drifted from what I might be reading to the dark savoured bitterness of the coffee then over to where the rising sun is catching the far hill in the valley. The fields are cut and dry and a cool breeze is coming in the window next to the one I am sitting beside. There is a precious sense of optimism swinging on the branches of the fir trees. I sigh and blink my way into the day. This quick sketch is a brief reminder of something that as of yet has no words other than the importance of waking up.

Here is a digital room view for size context.

Digital viewing room with Memories of Mornings by the Studio Window by Terrill Welch, 10 x 8 inch acrylic on linen board.

Reflective Analysis:

Mornings have always been an important part of my day and this appreciation has deepened over the years. Though I most often rise early it is not a busy time of day. I like to wake up before others can have any demands on my time or my thoughts. Sometimes, this is only a brief ten minutes. Other times I can be gifted a couple of hours. It all feels like the intervention of chance really. I used to swear that my young children heard my eyes flutter open and then they leaped out of bed so as not to miss out on anything. Now, my partner often does the same. But there is always a chance that everyone will sleep just a little longer and I can watch the day begin, wrapped up cozy, from one window or the other.

Reflexive Analysis:

Strong dark roast black coffee is my morning beverage of choice and comes with a whole ritual of hand grinding (by hand, no electric whirring noises for me) locally roasted coffee beans. The beans are coarsely ground for a 30 year old stainless steel insulated French press. Once brewed, a cup is poured into a favourite Italian mug and the rest is put into a heated stainless steel thermos that takes me most of the morning to drink. This ritual is a mix of childhood references of the practices of my parents and a west coast of Canada coffee culture that started developing around about the late 1980’s, early 1990’s, while I was going to the University of Victoria with two young children as a single parent, who also worked part time while going to school full time. Now, when I sit peacefully in the art studio chair by the window, still in my pajamas, drinking my whole first cup of coffee while it is hot, without having it answer questions, sign notes for school, add a child’s birthday party coming up on the weekend to my calendar, be reminded to pick someone up after school, I feel particularly blessed. I loved parenting and yet, I am still thrilled when my mornings begin by easing into the day instead of starting at full throttle.

Key Findings:

When I think back, I remember one of my high school principals who picked me up while hitchhiking in our small village to the place I was living a few miles away in the rural farmlands. He was very clear that, though I had graduated grade twelve, I was going to grow up to be poor white trash. I was unmarried, pregnant with my first child and not yet 19 years old. I mean — who says this to a young kid finding her way after having made some difficult choices!? I am ever-so-glad that I simply just didn’t believe him. I have always had a strong inner self-motivating pull to problem-solve around ways to achieve whatever is of most driving interest to me. These ritualized morning coffees are the foundation for my thinking and of my organizing structures. It is when I prioritize the items written into my calendar into the order that either must be done that day or that I have the most desire to complete. It is also where I look ahead over the coming weeks and months and see what needs to be refined and it is when I measure how well I am fulfilling any intentions I might have set. This small sketch holds all of this for me.

Anything else:

It is usually the case that we can accomplish far more than we and others think we can. There is a cost of course and this can’t be discounted. This isn’t usually what stops us from trying. More often than not it is a fear of failure or fear of something awful happening. I have learned to ask myself during my morning coffee — what is the worst that can happen and can I live with it? What is the worst that will happen if I do and what is the worst that will happen if I don’t? If I can live with the worst in relation to the decision I most want to make, that will generally be the route I will take. Who knew a small painting study of a person sitting in a window having a morning coffee could hold so much?

Defining “Close to Home” as a focus within my nature-centric, reparative painting practice

August 17, 2026 / Terrill Welch / Leave a comment

Monday, 17 August 2026

“Close to home” at first, brings up familiarity, safety and comfort. It is where I live my daily life most of the time. Geographically, these days “close to home” is usually limited to within a day’s drive in any direction which gives the concept physical parameters. There is an ordinariness that comes with these sustained intimately observed passages of time in one place doing “the usual” things such as getting groceries, hanging laundry on the line, grinding the morning coffee beans, paying bills online, going to the dentist, getting the car serviced, working in the yard, hugging my partner, children, grandchildren and friends between taking long hikes, painting in the studio and promoting the gallery and artworks. I ask myself, why is this focus on “Close to Home” in my painting practice important?

Developing red collage paper by Terrill Welch. August 8, 2026.

To answer this question is to first observe aspects of my contextualized autoethnographic references. The first and most obvious factor is that I am a full-time, primary caregiver for a partner that can quite happily no longer go further than the geographical territory mentioned above. I remain close to home because, to provide the best care for someone else, I must. The alternatives are to place my special human in respite care or to have someone come to stay with them. Neither of these options are easily workable in practice. By the time I get someone or someplace up to speed on this special being’s needs and them familiar with something they don’t want to do, the brief break becomes more of a traumatic ordeal for both of us than an actual opportunity. At least, this has been our experience so far. Eventually when regular weekly respite breaks become necessary, we will then have someone familiar providing additional support on ongoing. This might then present some opportunities for longer breaks for me to be able to at least go see my elderly parents which is a 7-10 day round trip visit away. For now, primary caregiving responsibilities take a central role, as a wife and as the human that is closest to the person in need. There are children. But the personal care needs and ongoing vascular dementia monitoring and prompting have gone well beyond their comfort levels and therefore not an option except possibly during a short term emergency until other care could be put in place. Community health home support services have been limited and expensive for what is provided. This leaves just me for now. We muddle through as best we can together which for now is pretty well. As an almost 68 year old white woman of settler ancestry, living on a rural small island on the southwest coast of Canada, I am resourceful, resilient, organized and pragmatic with a strong work ethic. I will face poverty level cash flows if/when the time comes to manage only on my own pensions. For now, there is enough to comfortably support both of us. But this reality is partly why I spent the past two years completing my MA Fine Art degree. It is a way to recognize the seriousness with which I take my painting practice that then might possibly lead to my artwork offering a small financial buffer if it is needed in the future. Global instability may make this a difficult proposition to realize but it would be even less of a possibility as an older woman artist without doing this degree.

Yellow gauche covered collage paper by Terrill Welch. August 8, 2026.

This brings up other aspects about being “Close to Home” including a sense of loss of freedom, of heavy sadness/grief about slowly losing someone to their disease, as well as facing my own limitations and mortality. How long can I reasonably keep up with these responsibilities? How long can I manage living on this rural island as the only person who is able to drive?

Three sheets of collage paper created by Terrill Welch. August 8, 2026.

Then I return again to my painting practice and its central role in making all challenging situations much more possible, pleasurable and endurable. This is especially true if I turn my painting practice directly towards what is challenging. In doing this, I seem to find my footing and my strength as well as my joy and pleasure with simply being alive.

These are the thoughts that came to mind as I created the collage paper, cut it up and then decided I wanted to paint instead. So, I packed up the paper cuttings and put them in a bag for another day.

Collage paper cuttings and a sketched ready to paint in Terrill Welch’s art studio.

I expect to have much more to discover about my focus on “Close to Home” as I proceed but for now, it is time to work on a small painting sketch featuring morning coffee in my studio chair.

Lady Arbutus Painting Data Collection

August 10, 2026August 12, 2026 / Terrill Welch / 2 Comments

Painting Data Collection

Title: Lady Arbutus	Date Completed: Wednesday, 5 August 2026
Materials: oil on linen covered birch wood	Size: 14 x 11 inches (36 x 28 cm)

Figurative/Abstract Self Assessment Band-Scale Rating between 1-10: 4-7

The background offers a loose abstract network of brushmarks while the tree is given figurative prominence with large shapes holding the composition within a visual space of warm morning summer light.

Reference Gathering:

This is a commissioned work and stems from an art collector’s shared love of this specific arbutus tree that resembles the long legs of a woman elegantly reaching for the sky. I have references going back years but chose just a few, between August 2023 and August 2025.

Collection of reference images between August 30, 2023 and August 20, 2025 by Terrill Welch in preparation for painting “Lady Arbutus” in August 2026.

Making Process:

My studio making process proceeded over a few days in 2-3 hour painting sessions. I required pauses to really listen to the painting and what it was asking of me. I also mentally invited the art collector into my musings with nature so that I could draw on the abundance of influences between us three. The focus is on a portrait of the arbutus tree while keeping a sense of context and hints of the ocean behind and beside the viewer. I have a special relationship with not just the arbutus tree but also the polar trees on the middle left. There are very few on Mayne Island but they grew in abundance around my childhood home.

Collage of work-in-progress images for Lady Arbutus by Terrill Welch 14 x 11 inch oil on linen covered birch wood.

Finished Painting:

“Lady Arbutus” by Terrill Welch, 14 x 11 inch oil on linen covered birch wood. Completed Wednesday, 5 August 2026.

For scale, here is the painting in a digital viewing room.

Digital room view – Lady Arbutus by Terrill Welch, 14 x 11 inch oil on linen covered birch wood.

Making Notes:

A ferry whistles in Active Pass on the other side of the island and echoes a response to the August sun pressing towards it through the trees. The calm ocean behind me pools at the bottom of the ridge next to a group of scrubby polar trees. Deep shadows offer a counterbalance to the bright trunks of the arbutus trees and rich soft greens of the grove. What would it like to be this arbutus tree tucked in next to a few strong firs beside the Salish Sea? I can feel the effort of stepping up on the weathered sandstone beside it as I traverse the narrow trail from the point. I like to pause for a few moments and just share its company before moving on. The artwork is a complex interconnected view to render in paint between dancing sunlight and thick growth reaching for the skies. Much is left to interpretation in an integrated network of suggestive figurative to abstract mark making.

Reflective Analysis:

For this painting, the complexity of vegetation and terrain was demanding to navigate into paint on a surface without over simplifying or offering so much information that the poetry of the moment is lost. I held significant pauses as I worked in order to make decisions about the order of things and then worked in a flurry for a while only to pause again to consider. The types of brushstrokes were decided by subject as I was mindful of only offering just enough to bring the work to life and present the essence of being this specific arbutus tree on this specific day.

Reflexive Analysis:

Commissions are different from work that is solely decided by my commitment and curiosity. I do have a formal process that allows maximum artistic freedom but it is still unique from my self-directed body of work. With my commission process, the art collector chooses the subject and size and a price is determined. I gather my own references and then paint the subject as I see fit. The art collector then decides if the work is to their satisfaction. If not, the work goes into my inventory and I try again. Payment for an artwork happens once a final decision to accept a painting has been made. This gives me maximum freedom as the painter and is the lowest risk for the art collector. Over the years this has been a win-win for everyone. That said, I only accept a very few commissions each year as they frequently take me away from whatever I am working in my studio practice. Not this painting though. It fits nicely into my current focus.

For this painting, I am aware that there is an alignment between how I approach my work and the lived experience of the art collector. So there is the Lady Arbutus tree and her immediate environment on this specific day that is then enriched by around nineteen years of my having walked and sat next to her in all kinds of weather and throughout the seasons. Then there is my awareness of the art collector’s numerous similar experiences and her many conversations with me over about half as many years. The art collector has entrusted me to bridge these various experiences and bring them to the surface of the painting in as much of an unencumbered way as I can imagine. But influences are like seed burs. They sink their hooks into my experiences and come along for the ride every time I dip my brush into the paint. It is something I must notice and also make peace with in order to bring the best I have to whatever work I am creating. Like all experiences, painting is not a pure isolated practice. The process is embedded in a multitude of interrelated and related variables. From this sea of information, a painting comes to rest uneasily on a surface as if by some alchemical, divine intervention. Even though the brushstrokes are made by my own hand, from my own observations and study, no one really owns these results in a lineage sort of way. It would be like saying that the dried thyme added to a stew was the only ingredient that mattered. It is important but, as with the painting, it wouldn’t be much without everything else.

Key Findings:

This painting was a great reminder to trust my creative process and stick with it, even when small doubts creep in around the edges.

Anything else:

The directness of working on this painting reminds me that I can benefit from creating without direct canvas and paint contact, even if it does not result in finished work. While I finished this painting, I also made some painted paper to cut up for collage puzzles. These never seem to amount to anything but they do offer a sort of different texture to my practice. Now that I have finished this work, I have set my paints aside to further explore these bits of hand coloured paper while I think about my overall research question and working definitions for this next body of work – Close To Home.

The Everyday Beauty of Art: Reflections on ‘Lady Arbutus’

August 3, 2026 / Terrill Welch / Leave a comment

Monday, 3 August 2026

I am standing at the easel this morning and decided I would write while taking a teabreak. The painting catches the glare from the late morning sun outside the art studio window. I leave it and the brushes where they were put down and glance at the finished painting with almost dry edges that I thankfully had remembered to cover before I started.

An early August morning in the art studio of Terrill Welch with work-in-progress.

A rough sketch had been completed yesterday and set up on my old French Box easel so that I could settle right into painting this morning.

A rough sketch by Terrill Welch, on a 14 x 11 inch linen covered birch board surface, is set on a French Box easel with the palette below Sunday evening in preparation for the next morning’s painting session.

Collection of reference images between 30 August 2023 and 20 August 2025 by Terrill Welch in preparation for painting “Lady Arbutus” in August 2026.

While I am painting, I do not think of much but rather focus on what I am remembering and feeling about this specific tree and this specific place which is no longer publicly accessible since much of the land around it was purchased as part of a conservation land use agreement. I cherish and I am deeply grateful for the vision of the landowners and those that worked to acquire the lands for this reason. It is a small price to pay to respect the request to stay off of the very point of Edith Point that is still held as private land. This aside, I lean into my memories again.

work-in-progress on the easel of “Lady Arbutus” by Terrill Welch, 14 x 11 inch oil on linen covered birch board.

There is a ferry whistle in Active Pass on the other side of the island that echoes a response to the August sun pressing towards it through the trees. A calm ocean behind me pools in the bottom left of the painting. It isn’t there in the reference. This won’t matter and it might not even stay to the finish line. For now it needs to be there. Deep shadows offer a counterbalance to the bright trunks of the arbutus trees and rich soft greens of stunted poplar trees in the grove. What would it like to be this arbutus tree tuck in next to a few strong firs next to the Salish Sea? Answering this question is a significant part of the job of this painting. Though it may indeed capture a beautiful moment, that is not its purpose. It is a working painting and will bring a sense of being close to home and all that this means. This is true for most of my paintings. They are not collected as decorative objects or for status or for their uniqueness but rather for good company!

This brings me to a book I am reading and a question. Can paintings have an everyday use, like a hand turned pottery mug or a hand knit sweater? The Japanese philosopher, art historian, aesthete and poet, Soetsu Yanagi (1889 – 1961), proposes that true beauty does not come from straining to be remarkable. It comes from a kind of forgetting. Mingei or “crafts of the people”, is used to describe an approach and an object that “must be wholesomely and honestly made for practical use” (Yanagi, 2019, p. 5). These objects have been made without a need to be special or important and without grasping for attention. Further, the objects grow in beauty by their daily use. They are objects that have been made well and keep us company as we move through our ordinary lives. Yanagi in his book The Beauty of Everyday Things is speaking about anonymous folk craft and something that is different from what we understand as aristocratic contemporary fine art. However, I want to consider how my paintings might be and most often are acquired for their use value — not for decoration, not for spectacle or status but rather for daily company. This daily company is of course the underlying practice in which my brush touched the canvas in the first place. The paintings are the result of my conversation with nature that then invites the viewer into these exchanges. Skill, practice, the quality of the materials matter, just like they do for the craft worker making a mug or weaving a basket. The works are not about being unique, though this over time happens without this being the intent. I mostly want to examine how a painting, as a crafted object, has a use value in our ordinary day, beyond an exploration of an idea that would lend itself to being considered contemporary art which, for the most part, is less interested in skill mastery or material quality. More importantly, can a painting hold both these philosophical and practical frameworks at the same time – humble usefulness for daily company and the successful exploration of a unique idea or concept? These are the questions I am asking as I read while knowing that my work does not have a physical use, definitely is not anonymous, and often it is not, broadly speaking, unique enough to fit easily into contemporary art sensibilities (presuming contemporary art can genuinely claim such a thing as sensibility).

Well, teabreak is over. It is time I set this musing aside and get back to the easel and see where this painting takes me next.

Work-in-progress on “Lady Arbutus” by Terrill Welch, 14 x 11 inch oil on linen covered birch board.

Reference list:

Yanagi, S. (2019). The Beauty of Everyday Things. Penguin Books.

Podcast Episode: Painting Nature And Grief

July 27, 2026July 27, 2026 / Terrill Welch / Leave a comment

Pip: Welcome to Creative Potager, where the paint is still wet and the questions are older than the canvas.

Mara: This episode draws from Terrill Welch’s recent posts — we’re moving through landscape painting on the Salish Sea shoreline, the pauses and decisions that shape a painting mid-process, and the harder territory of grief and creative repair.

Pip: Let’s start with the arbutus trees and what it means to keep returning to them.

Painting Arbutus Trees on the Salish Sea Shore

Mara: The first post opens at seven in the morning on a sandstone shoreline — the question underneath it is what it means to paint the same subject repeatedly and still find it necessary.

Pip: The post frames it directly. The setup is a hillside at dawn, references gathered, canvas waiting — and then this: “I have painted these arbutus trees many times but I am never done with them. There is a spiritual connection that seems to happen with arbutus trees.”

Mara: So the repeated subject isn’t a habit or a comfort zone — it’s an ongoing conversation. The tree is a place to put something down, literally: losses and grief as compost, released into the soil rather than carried.

Pip: And the companion piece, Solace Between Sea and Sky Painting Data Collection, makes that concrete. The finished painting took nineteen days of focused work — plus, as the post puts it, fifty years of practice.

Mara: The data collection post is unusually candid about why the solace was needed. New caregiving routines, exhaustion, a partner with dementia. The arbutus tree becomes, in that context, a symbol of quiet, determined striving.

Pip: Which is exactly what Martin Gayford argues painting demands — the post quotes him: “Making a truly powerful and original painting is very hard.” The response here isn’t to aim for brilliant. It’s to keep the conversation going rather than go silent.

Mara: That’s the real stakes of the segment — not mastery, but refusal to stop speaking.

Listening to What the Canvas Needs

Mara: Answering the Painter’s Questions sits inside the same painting’s timeline and asks something specific: what do you do when the work stalls and won’t proceed?

Pip: The answer is — you wait. The post describes leaving the canvas “sitting in an awful awkwardness as if caught in an elaborate pose of painter’s frozen tag.”

Mara: What follows isn’t paralysis. It’s a walk, a birthday, an hour of painting when the window opens. The post frames every decision — abstract the foliage or not, make the tree pop — as provisional, each answer undoing several others already made.

Pip: Painting is a process of endless decisions and often there are no right answers. Just better ones, eventually.

Grief, Caregiving, and the Reparative Turn

Pip: The Reparative Turn in Painting names the hardest territory directly — what does a painting practice mean when you’re watching someone you love decline?

Mara: The post anchors itself in a specific art-historical idea: “What does the reparative turn in my painting practice mean under these circumstances? I am surmising it flexes on my desire, for now, to stay grounded and rooted on this earthly plain of existence.”

Pip: Monet painting beside his dying wife. Munch recording his sister’s death. Those are the predecessors named here — but the post draws a careful distinction. Those were final moments. Caregiving dementia is the long preceding journey of knowing and watching and bracing.

Mara: The painting that launches from this post is the same arbutus tree, the same lemon-yellow ground. The creative act and the grief work are not separate projects.

Pip: Three segments, one shoreline, one persistent question about why we keep making things when everything is hard.

Mara: The next episode will show us where that question leads — keep painting, as the post says. Just keep painting.

Note: this is a fictional dialogue created with WordPress AI using content from Terrill Welch’s recent Creative Potager posts to make a podcast summary for people who like to listen as well as read.

The posts used are:

The Reparative Turn in Painting: Embracing Grief and Creativity

The Spiritual Connection in Painting Arbutus Trees

Answering the Painter’s Questions

And…

Solace Between Sea and Sky Painting Data Collection

Solace Between Sea and Sky Painting Data Collection

July 27, 2026August 8, 2026 / Terrill Welch / 1 Comment

Painting Data Collection

Title: Solace Between Sea and Sky	Date Completed: Saturday, July 25, 2026
Materials: oil on canvas	Size: 31.5 x 27.5 inches (80 x 70 cm)

Figurative/Abstract Self Assessment Band-Scale Rating between 1-10:

This work sits primarily at “4” with Camille Corot and April Gornik (Impressionism is a five and in the middle between figurative at 1 and full abstraction at 10). Yet it is a closer more intimate view that has us crouched next to the arbutus tree for company. The foliage above and below is abstracted but not noticeably so. The rest is clearly a figurative tree, sandstone shore, sea, sky and distant shoreline.

Reference Gathering:

My references are from an early morning walk that saw me at this location on Edith Point at just before 7:00 am on Monday, July 6 2026. The sun had risen a couple of hours earlier but there were still hints of warm morning light. There is the arbutus tree of course but it was the totality of the morning’s walk that will later resonate in a more complete memory onto the canvas. The sandstone shore wasn’t just viewed. It was walked on and sat on while I ran my fingers over its sandpaper-like surface. The sea sounds were as soft as warm morning air flickering across my cheeks. There were other trees close by but I chose the arbutus and in the end its company is outside of our view.

Reference inspiration for Solace Between Sea and Sky by Terrill Welch.

Making Process:

My painting process begins with a few composition lines. I have the notion of painting the tree “From the Ground Up” so that I can feel the forest overhead as well as under my feet. Yet, how will I create such a feeling? I also wanted to be standing “with” the arbutus tree rather than looking “at” it. I am listening to the arbutus tree tell me its story of time in what is a long and meaningful conversation. The painting process takes place over 12 days with moments of pause so layers can dry. But also pauses for the painting to decide what it needed from me. The last image in the collage is not the final painting yet but all significant decisions had been made at this point. My simplifications and exaggerations are in full view. Memory is often like that. We leave things out and make up other things to capture the inner resonance of what we want to convey.

Painting process for Solace Between Sea and Sky by Terrill Welch.

Finished Painting:

Solace Between Sea and Sky by Terrill Welch, 31.5 x 27.5 inch oil on canvas. Completed July 25, 2026.

Making Notes:

Early in the morning I hiked along the outside trail early of the Edith Point Conservation Lands next to Strait of Georgia. During the summer the sun rises far enough north to slam this shore in brilliant sunlight for the first view hours of a day. The receding tide leaves small pools of seawater along the lower parts of the sandstone shore. Low clouds on the horizon still have a bit of an orange popsicle hue. What might it be like to be this specific arbutus tree rooted deeply along the high part of the bank and stretching day after day for every casual ray of sunlight? It is a quiet determined striving that I can take solace in. I soak up the moment for as long as it can last. Seconds really. Or maybe an eternity. Each brushstroke contains purpose and random execution at once. It is not the mystery of discover so much as knowing where I am and wanting it stay. This painting opens up under my first viewer’s gaze. I can feel the grandness of expanse filled with early morning’s comfort and possibilities just as I remembered it during my hike.

Digital Room View for size reference:

Digital room view using the Canvy app showing at scale “Solace Between Sea and Sky” by Terrill Welch.

Reflective Analysis:

At this specific time, I am beginning a new thematic body of work that I have yet to form into a rigorous research question. I just know, I want to be with the trees and look down onto the seafloor where I have spent the past two years at the tideline painting close up work that I composed primarily vertically into “landscapes of the small” or “child’s view” compositions. One must hold the expanse of the shoreline above one’s head doing this work. I want to hold a grand view perspective again, even if I still crouch close to the earth.

Reflexive Analysis:

The title has the “solace” as a primary reference. I find in a moment of solace, as here in the company of the arbutus tree and taking in the sea and sky, there is also acknowledgment of pain or grief. The desire or need for solace necessarily describes the other. From my first viewer’s gaze, maybe due to my own painter’s hand, I can fully sense both of these halves that make a whole. I was raw and tired as I pushed hard to get the last of my assignment materials ready for assessment. We had lost our home support services due to retirement so my partner and I were working out how we were going to best do his showers together, just the two of us. We found a way but new routines are harder, for both of us, when someone has dementia. But in the end we came up with an even better solution than how he was showering before and a method that allowed him more independents under my prompts and supervision. So this arbutus tree is not just comfort but also a symbol or inner strength, perseverance and resilience. Standing with this tree, I have company during my most challenging doubts and fears and exhaustion. I come away from the view and the easel ready to continue and step just a little lighter from the warmth of such an early morning expanse and the recognition that all things are interconnected and whole, for this brief moment.

Key Findings:

I had the desire to keep a wide range of brush marks between figurative and abstract but that isn’t what the painting asked for and I knew better than to question its lead. The process from inspiration to completion of the work took 19 days plus another two days to organize my thoughts and data collection to write about the process. So if anyone asks how long it took, the answer is 50 years of a nature-centric, reparative painting practice plus 21 days of focused attention. This work doesn’t come easy. The paintings are moulded out of the blood flow that makes up my full sensory life and contemplated experiences.

Anything else:

The solution to an attempt that falls short of my intention is to try again. Keep painting, I tell myself. Just keep painting.

What might you do to continue with something that you haven’t quite yet succeeded in accomplishing?

Answering the Painter’s Questions

July 20, 2026July 20, 2026 / Terrill Welch / 2 Comments

Monday, July 20 2026

Oftentimes, a painting doesn’t proceed in a straightforward momentum from start to finish. I need pauses to listen clearly to what the canvas is asking. Then the paint becomes tacking in the dry summer air and I must let it completely dry to the touch before continuing. Such was the case last Wednesday. I left it sitting in an awful awkwardness as if caught in an elaborate pose of painter’s frozen tag.

Work-in-progress of a new arbutus tree portrait on a 31.5 x 27.5 inch oil on canvas work by Terrill Welch shown on the easel in her studio. Wednesday, July 15, 2026.

I went to Reef Bay and couldn’t help myself but to gather a few random compositions of the seafloor. It is like picking berries. I don’t want to just let the ripe ones fall to the ground and forever lost. Instead, I collected them up in reference images and tucked them in the folder for “Close to Home”.

Nothing may come of them but they stilled something restless within me.

David had a birthday on Sunday and on Saturday family came to celebrate. That meant Friday was used for preparation and Thursday is still school for a few more weeks. So here we are with a dry to the touch painting late Monday morning.

The work-in-progress oil on canvas by Terrill Welch has now dried to the touch. She is ready to continue. Monday, July 20 2026.

I had about an hour available to me to paint. I took it! The linseed oil softened to the consistency of butter in the midday heat. I focused and then drifted on the gentle blue sea that has yet to come alive in the painting. I didn’t get far but still. It is something.

work-in-progress oil on canvas by Terrill Welch. Monday, July 20 2026.

We then went for a drive to get David a mocha and then stopped at a farm stand for the first of the blackberries and some sweet yellow plums. The deep warm of the sun kisses the air with their fragrance.

Local Mayne Island Blackberries and Yellow Plums. Photograph by Terrill Welch. Monday, July 20 2026.

As I drive, I am still thinking about the painting. It needs more paint I decide. And the arbutus tree really needs to pop as the star if it is going to be a portrait. Do I want to abstract the foliage both at the top of the tree and on the ground? Painting is a process of endless decisions and often there are no right answers but there might be better answers and one decision usually affects (undoes) several others that have already been made. But this is all the answering I am going to do for today.

The Spiritual Connection in Painting Arbutus Trees

July 13, 2026 / Terrill Welch / 2 Comments

Monday, July 13 2026

I crest the low ridge just after seven in the morning as sunlight slams into the lower sandstone shoreline and dances across the sea to meet a soft mostly cobalt blue sky once it lifts over the fog resting on the water near the coast mountains. My eyes scan the elements and square up the view. It will work. I am sure it will work. I begin to gather references, shifting my feet and contorting my body to get the angles I desire. Nothing is perfect of course. I do not expect it to be. This is why it will need my imagination, a canvas and paint. References are a memory link and a starting point for later.

Now in the studio with the ground dry on a 31.5 x 27.5 inch canvas, I begin to block in various elements. A couple of hours pass. I take off my paint smeared red apron and document what I have so far.

The beginning of painting an arbutus tree along the shores of Edith Point by Terrill Welch.

It is almost noon. While boiling water for tea I begin to ponder. What does it mean to be this specific arbutus tree on this specific ridge overlooking the Salish Sea? If I was this tree, what would be the most dominant element? Would it be that soft peachy morning sky or would I give priority to the sea? Or maybe it would be the squishing of tiny roots spreading through the salal that I am standing in that is taking up the most attention. Perhaps it is the wind whistling through dried lower branches as it cools the first rays of sun? I am not sure I can guess. I sip my tea and look at the messy beginnings.

I have painted these arbutus trees many times but I am never done with them. There is a spiritual connection that seems to happen with arbutus trees. I imagine laying my hand on the large exposed root at the base of its trunk and let whatever is troubling me drain down into the earth on its long spidery tentacles. Losses and grief are good compost and best turned over and released into the soil rather than being compartmentalized and carried between my shoulder blades.

I reach for a new book I am reading by Martin Gayford, How Painting Happens (and why it matters). Gayford begins where a painter knows he must – “Painting is difficult. Or rather, making a truly powerful and original painting is very hard (Gayford, 2024, p. 12). He goes on to explain that part of the problem is the long history of painting that has been practiced by brilliant artists ahead of me and that it is hard to find new areas to explore. This has never really stopped me from trying though. Not because I expect to paint anything particularly brilliant or ground breaking but because painting is a way of holding a conversation between nature and me and then later, with the viewer. What is the alternative? To remain silent? Better to paint something that is less than brilliant than to say nothing at all.

Reference list:

Gayford, M. (2024). How Painting Happens. Thames and Hudson Ltd.

The Reparative Turn in Painting: Embracing Grief and Creativity

July 8, 2026July 8, 2026 / Terrill Welch / Leave a comment

Wednesday, July 8 2026

Painting the Beauty and Sorrow of Loss – beginning the Close to Home Series

This series will require courage and bravery to honestly and frankly find my balance between beauty and sorrow within loss. I have other painters before me who have faced such challenges through their own brushes, such as “Camille on Her Deathbed” by Monet from 1879 where he stood painting beside his wife Camille, who was dying.

Camille on Her Deathbed by Claude Monet, 1879.

Then there was time Monet was painting the lily pads following the death of his son while the echo from the guns of battle were audible in the distance. There is also Edvard Munch and “Death in the Sickroom” from 1893 when he recorded the death of his sister to tuberculosis.

Though these are more final moments rather than the proceeding journey of knowing and watching and bracing oneself that comes from caregiving someone in the later stages of dementia.

What does the reparative turn (Forrester, 2020) in my painting practice mean under these circumstances? I am surmising it flexes on my desire, for now, to stay grounded and rooted on this earthly plain of existence. I will unpack this further as I continue to work over the months ahead. This is where my first painting in this series begins with painting the portrait of an arbutus tree along the shores of (what is now called) Mayne Island next to the Salish Sea – from the ground up.

The morning began with painting acrylic lemon yellow grounds on a larger 31.5 x 27.5 canvas and three smaller 8 x 10 inch linen boards that will be used for studies and plein air painting.

Terrill Welch laying down a lemon ground on a large cotton canvas in the overcast morning of the studio as her coffee grows cold. July 8, 2026.

There is something palatably thrilling in the tension that coils up inside the core of my being when I am about to launch into a new body of work.

View down into the wood framed windows of art studio of Terrill Welch with small finished work lining the ledge on the left, new small linen boards with yellow grounds on an old washstand under the window. On the right a crumpled corner with throw and studio blue chair before the enamel topped table holding the artist’s apron resting on a covered palette beside the large wood easel with a substantial canvas with an equally bright yellow ground. A black anti-fatigue mat rests waiting in front of the easel on the grey stone finished ceramic tiles.

The only question remaining is – do I start the new work or paint the edges of recently finished pieces first?

Reference List:

Forrester, S. (2020). Painting from the Other Side: Tracing the Reparative Turn in Contemporary Practice. Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, 5(1), pp.116–147. doi:https://doi.org/10.18432/ari29486

REAWAKENING MY PUBLIC ART RESEARCH JOURNAL

July 6, 2026 / Terrill Welch / 2 Comments

Monday, July 6 2026

For the past two years I have kept an art research journal as part of my MA Fine Art Studies. Many of these posts have been featured in my “Terrill Welch by herself” newsletter. However, my degree studies are coming to a close. I am beginning a new series of work. Since I have found the art research journal useful, I have decided to continue the practice here, even though this space has, for the most part, been dormant since 2022. What is four years in a lifetime of an art practice!? Let’s continue!

You can learn more about my recent art autoethnographic theory and nature-centric reparative painting research practice, as well as my intentions for disseminating my new Seafloor series, on my website at: https://terrillwelchartist.com/disseminating-a-nature-centric-reparative-painting-practice/

You can also visit my individual final degree show that will opening on August 20,2026. It has to be up and published now for assessment by the university so you are also welcome to have browse if you wish at: https://terrillwelchartist.com/terrill-welch-five-seasons-ma-fine-art-final-show/

I will continue to develop my theory and art research led painting practice as I begin a new series, tentatively called “Close to Home”, as I again spend time with trees as I meander (what is now called) Mayne Island and at times capture domestic moment that connect nature with our daily habits within the shelter of our strawbale timberframe home.

Early this morning at around 6:30 am, I was hiking Edith Point and think about how I might proceed. There is the most satisfying summer task of hanging laundry on the covered clothesline of the side porch.

Laundry drying on the line. Photograph by Terrill Welch. June 14, 2026.

Or, if my significant other is still sleeping, there is my morning coffee ritual in the blue chair down in the studio as I watch the sun come around to catch the trees on the far hill.

Morning coffee in the blue chair of the art studio. Photograph by Terrill Welch. June 28, 2026.

Then again, reading on the bench on the other side of the house is also a moment I treasure.

Outside on the bench with wind in the trees for company drinking garden mint tea and reading the second half of Book of Lives: a memoir of sorts that I put down at the beginning of my 3rd and final term in an MA Fine Art degree delivered completely online. Photograph by Terrill Welch. July 4, 2026.

However, there is also the calm of a blue-green sea that make me exhale fully.

A calm green Salish Sea strikes an elegant pose. Photograph by Terrill Welch. June 28, 2026.

Or it could be sighting the clouds that show up in a tidal pool that holds my attention.

Clouds in a Tidal Pool. Photograph by Terrill Welch. June 28, 2026.

Yet, as I was walking along with the scent of soil and sea enveloping the lemony hue of the morning air around me, I thought about the trees and how they continue to teach me how to thrive while being rooted in one place. Maybe this would be a good place to start?

Early morning sun greeting the crest of a knoll next to the sea. Photograph by Terrill Welch. July 6, 2026.

There is an arbutus tree that has yet to come under my brushes and I am itching to see what I can do for its portrait.

Arbutus tree catching the 7:00 am summer sun that is already warm and scenting the air with sea earth and a nearby pine tree. Photograph by Terrill Welch. July 6, 2026.

This tree might be the first of this new series to be tackled at the easel! We shall see. Right now, ideas are being filed into an album of references so that they are ready as soon as I get a chance to start.

Welcome to a new journey and adventure in my painting practice. I do not have a posting schedule but will likely add something new each week so I can keep track of what I am doing. Until next time! Feel free to comment if you wish.