Finding Home on San Juan Island, Washington
“Finding Home” Acrylic on gessoed paper, 2023. 10” x 7.5” (25.5 cm x 19 cm)
It is hard to capture in words how I feel about the place Shelley and I now call home.
When we first heard about San Juan Island, we were living in a very small 1906 Victorian cottage in the small coastal town of Pacific Grove, near Monterey, California. Shelley was teaching school in Carmel-by-the-Sea and volunteering as a docent guide at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I was working as a layout artist for a local magazine and running my entertainment business as well. We always seemed to be so busy…
Then one day the AAA magazine arrived in the mail, and we saw a little ad in the back pages: “Come see the orca whales in the San Juan Islands!”.
Shelley had always wanted to see orcas, and I badly needed a vacation. So we made our reservations and set out for the great, unkown Pacific Northwest with no real idea of what to expect. We certainly could not have guessed that that little trip would change our lives forever.
When the Washington State Ferry came around the corner of Brown Island, and we saw the Port of Friday Harbor for the first time, we knew. We just instantly knew: we were home.
The painting above, “Finding Home”, attempts to capture that first feeling of seeing the sparkle of the buildings on the shore, the light fog floating just above the water, the vast openness of the sky. Of arriving in a place that is completely unfamiliar, full of promise, waiting to be discovered.
That was in 2001. We finally made our move here in 2007, but that’s another story (many stories, actually) and another painting. Suffice to say that we’ve been here for 18 years now and we’re still discovering, still exploring, and still extremely grateful to be living in this incredible environment that nourishes us with it’s natural beauty and magnificence every day.
If you’ve never visited here, you should. If you have, you should come back again. It is a place of renewal and restoration.