Portfolio of Works

Everyday Sacred celebrates the extraordinary in the ordinary.  

A cocktail shaker. A teapot. A light bulb. A paper bag. These familiar, enduring objects are painted as portraits, each one carefully observed and brought to life through a subtle monochrome palette.

There is beauty in the things we live with every day, if we stop long enough to really see them. In these paintings, light, shadow, and movement give even the humblest object presence, personality, and soul.

“When I paint a still life, I want it to be anything but still. I want it to shimmer with light. I want it to rustle with movement.” — Kurt Anderson

It’s Nothing to Crow About grew out of a fascination with crows—their intelligence, their beauty, their confidence, and their sense of mischief.

There is something compelling about a crow. They are elegant and mysterious one moment, comical and irreverent the next. They watch us as intently as we watch them, seemingly aware of far more than they want us to know.

These oil paintings explore their character. Some are quiet and contemplative.  Others find the quirky humor in a gesture.

As with much of her work, the paintings are about looking closely. What first appears simple reveals the unexpected.  Some paintings invite contemplation. Others invite a smile.  And some suggest that the crow may be in on the joke.

Perhaps, after all, there is something to crow about.

“If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows.” — Henry Ward Beecher

The Veiled Vistas series began during a plein air painting session on a stunning ranch in northwest Marin.  There were stands of trees planted in the 1800s, their structure forming a natural screen through which the landscape beyond appeared and disappeared. That day, the view inspired a painting—and eventually a larger exploration of what it means to see beyond.

Over time, the series came to hold more than landscape. It reflected the closed-in quality of life during Covid-19 and our longing for the beautiful, sometimes mysterious world beyond our immediate reach. The trees themselves became both subject and metaphor: stately and protective, offering shelter from wind and sun, while simultaneously concealing and revealing the view beyond.

That tension—between what is hidden and what is revealed—became central to the work. It speaks to the parts of our lives we protect and keep private, and the parts we choose to share with the world.

In both life and painting, meaning often resides in nuance. A subtle shift in light, an opening between branches, a glimpse of distant color can change what we see and how we experience it. The details an artist chooses to reveal—or leave obscured—can disclose as much about the artist as they do about the subject.

Painting each work in Veiled Vista is a meditative process of give and take, moving back and forth between the veil and the vista until the painting finds its balance. The hope is that the viewer might linger there too—looking through, looking beyond, and perhaps getting a little lost in the view.

“Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.”— Kahlil Gibran

The sunrise, of course, doesn't care if we watch it or not.  It will keep on being beautiful, 

even if no one bothers to look at it.

Gene Amole