Shown above are three samples of fine art watercolor prints, made with the environment in mind.
They’re widening 35W. The creep of highway lanes means less habitat for wildlife. Driving* through narrow passages with concrete barriers, I hear the low grind of equipment reshaping a stretch of ground that was never really ours to begin with. It’s easy, in the weeks of road construction, to feel like the natural world is losing against our need for expansion. Not dramatically. Just steadily and predictably. A little more pavement, a little less edge-of-our-lawns wildness for the birds, insects, and the green infrastructure they call home.
That edge — the ordinary-extraordinary strip where a yard gives way to something wilder — is more or less where all my work happens. Not the dramatic landscapes but the overlooked corners of everyday natural spaces. Last week I found an entire tiny universe tucked under a neighbor’s mailbox: stones, dried leaves, a scatter of seeds, a few fallen branches arranged just so, like something had been slowly building there all along. It’s nature doing the arranging. I already have plans to turn it into a watercolor painting.
That’s the love this shop is built out of. Loving “the peace of wild things,” the small and disappearing changes happening in my immediate outdoor surroundings, and how they make a living in the margins.
* I am so fortunate that we drive a Subaru Solterra, an all-electric vehicle. We are early adopters of EV cars, and it wasn’t always easy. But with smoke-filled skies being common over the summer, and the price of gas, we are so grateful we made the leap.
After a long search and many test prints, I found a print vendor who checked all the boxes. Beautiful prints, so close to the original watercolors I could hardly believe it; beautiful paper with the look and feel of watercolor paper; and, for the environmentalist in me, completely carbon-neutral print production.
Why fifty, and not more?
Every print in the shop is part of an edition of fifty. Not because fifty is a nice round number, but because a population — of ladybugs, of prairies, of a wetland, of anything living at the margins — isn’t infinite either, and I wanted the prints to hold that same restraint. Printing an open-ended run would have cheapened the very thing I’m asking you to slow down and notice. Fifty is a deliberate stop. Each one is numbered, so you know exactly how many exist, and so do I.
A sample view of what’s in the fine art print shop: Wild Indigo (watercolor with buckthorn berries),
On Earth Our Time is Precious (Round-lobed Hepatica) and Reaching for the Light (early spring garden sedum).
Why did it take this long to open?
Restraint doesn’t end with the edition size. It mattered just as much how the prints were actually made. I spent a long time finding a print partner whose process didn’t undercut the point of the work itself. The printer I ultimately chose runs a carbon-neutral process, and offsets what it can’t reduce by funding projects that focus on a safer climate and more sustainable world. That’s not a marketing detail to me — it’s the same instinct as the edition size, and the care I took to build the shop. Limited print editions mean nothing if the printing itself costs the planet something extra.
That search — testing papers, finding a printer that could hold up both technically and ethically, rebuilding the shop around it — is the unglamorous part nobody wants to read about. So I’ll leave it there: it happened, it took a while, and it’s the reason this shop wasn’t rushed into existence.
Why you might want one.
A print on your wall isn’t just decoration. It’s a standing reminder to keep noticing — the plants, the trees, the birds, the wetlands and prairies, the stones under a mailbox — long after the walk that inspired it is over. With so much of where I live, in the suburbs of southeastern Minnesota, overlooked wildness being paved, mowed, sprayed, or developed, owning a piece of it isn’t nostalgia. It’s a small, visible form of paying attention. As Mary Oliver wrote, “Paying attention is the beginning of devotion.”
And it’s accessible in a way an original watercolor isn’t. A limited edition print lets you hold onto something real — responsibly made, honestly limited — without pretending it’s the one-of-a-kind original.
What’s live now.
Thirty-three pieces are up in the shop now, representing my many hikes and observations at regional parks to the edge of my own lawn and garden. Prints come in variable sizes, with a one-inch border for easy handling and framing. Free U.S. shipping. Each one is part of a numbered edition of fifty, never to be reprinted. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.
If any of this — the birds and plants at the edge of your own lawn, the stone that made you stop on a walk resonates with you, I’d love for you to take a look.
Stay in the loop.
New fine art prints will be added as time and studio schedules allow. Want to be the first to learn of new releases? Sign up for my (mostly) monthly art letter. Never boring, just the good stuff.
