california

Spring hiking and biking!

| WildTomato

After the rain, there are the flowers.

This spring, I’ve been out on my bike, and on my own two feet hiking along the California coast.

I’ve also been inspired by children’s books, and the amazing artistic freedom shown by so many illustrators.

Check out my new portfolio of Wildflower Collage Illustrations (some of which are available NOW in the store as limited edition prints) and below, enjoy a sneak peek into my landscape sketchbook from this spring. All sketches were done outside! Follow me on Instagram to see these images in their natural environment. Continue reading →

A special place

| WildTomato

There are many special places along this small strip of California coastline I now call home.

One of them feels particularly special because I get to visit every two weeks as a volunteer goat milker. What began as a once-in-a-while opportunity has become part of the rhythm of my life. The rhythm of rising early on a Monday morning and driving south on Highway One. The rhythm of the seasons, the fog, the sun, and the changing colors of the hills on San Gregorio Road. The rhythm of cows and calves, of yellow mustard flowers, of the black earth freshly tilled, of the harvest.

What makes a place special, anyway?

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Just like that…

| WildTomato

I have started hiking again. After many months of biking, beach sitting, yoga indoors, and other forms that had replaced the simple act of walking under the trees, I returned to hiking.

This weekend, on Valentine’s Day to be exact, a six and a half mile hike with grand views and not a soul in sight.

Hiking reminds me that the only way to get “there” is one “here” at a time, by the rhythm of my own breath and the pace of my own two feet one in front of the other.

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Being Still

| WildTomato

 

Farm Fatales visit 1

This was a place built by women.

She had come to meet a friend at her home on top of the hill. Her friend wasn’t home.

Maybe she’d remembered the wrong day. So she walked down the hill a bit, looking for a neighbor who might know.

Only to spot a woman banging on her water tank’s reverse thread coupling with a hammer yelling, “WHY? WHY? WHY?”.

It was, she says, a sister-in-need moment.

Time to help with the skills she had learned all those summers of her childhood on her uncle’s ranch in Oregon. She knew how to live in the weeds. Always carried a toolbox in her truck. Had one that very day, in fact, just another walk up the hill. She would end up fixing the toilet, too, and staying another seventeen years.

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