Restore Peace Painting Retreats
I didn’t set out to build a painting retreat business.
I was trying to stabilize myself.
During an uprooting season when everything I once relied on stopped working — my instincts, my confidence, even the tools that had always helped me support others — I turned toward something quieter. I began painting. Not to make art. Not to express myself. But to feel myself beneath the noise.
For years, I painted in silence. It began with landscapes — mountains, forests, water, and sky. Later, my system shifted and drew me toward fluid art, where I poured the parts of myself I no longer needed onto, and then off, the canvas. Eventually, I found my way to portrait work, where I began painting the human form.
Throughout this entire season, time in nature remained constant. I wasn’t trying to find answers. I was trying to feel steady again. And slowly, through creative presence and time outdoors, something shifted. I began to trust myself again — not who I had been, but who I was becoming.
Creative presence did more than still me.
The act of creating occupied my mind just enough for what was emerging to be heard. It gave form to what presence alone could not yet reveal — allowing the rest of me to catch up gently, without force.
I’ve always been deeply somatic. I learn, teach, and sense through the body. Words have never been my primary way of knowing. Art became the place where truth could surface without analysis or judgment — where presence could do what thinking could not.
But here is what I have come to understand most deeply.
There are two selves we move through the world with.
There is the self that was shaped by everything we were taught to be. The achieving self. The pleasing self. The proving self. The one that learned to lead from fear of not being enough. Most of us have been operating from that self for so long that we have forgotten there is another one underneath.
And there is the connected self. The one that knows. That senses. That trusts. The one that was always there, quietly waiting beneath the noise.
When we act from the conditioned self we are acting from the wrong ground entirely. From a place that is braced, exhausted, and not fully true. But when we act from the connected self, from the part of us that has learned to listen deeply, everything changes. Not because we try harder. Because we finally stop.
Stopped performing. Stopped pushing. Stopped trying to figure it out.
And listened instead.
Before this work, I spent over two decades in education, in both public and private settings, working closely with students, families, and educators. My early work focused on making learning experiential and personal. Over time, my role shifted toward deep listening and holding space with discernment, often during moments of transition, stress, and uncertainty.
What I came to see again and again was this. The purest, most authentic version of a person wants freedom to exist without judgment and without needing permission. That understanding quietly informs everything I offer now.
Restore Peace Painting Retreats grew directly from this lived experience.
My work is not about art therapy, self-improvement, or making something beautiful. It is about creating the conditions where you can slow down long enough to hear yourself. To develop the inner listening that makes self-trust possible. And to discover what becomes available in your art, your decisions, and your life when you finally stop overriding what you already know.
This happens through mark-making and creative presence beside the pond. Through two-day immersive retreats that sharpen the listening through form, release, and recognition. Through attunement paintings that reflect back what is already true about you at your core. And through a free practice you can return to whenever you need a quiet place to land.
The work is slow by design. Nothing is forced. Nothing is analyzed. Nothing is rushed.
What unfolds is always enough.