Mountain Cabin Studio

   I was born and raised in Butte, Montana. My Dad was a hard rock miner. It was a hard life, with hard winters and a lot of drinking. We spent our summers in Melrose, Montana at our Grandmother’s cabin. She would take us high up in the Pioneer Mountains where all the old mining towns were, and tell us of the life and times of our forefathers. The vast openness, rugged wilderness, and breathtaking beauty seemed timeless, sacred and so much bigger than the human condition. This vastness and beauty spoke to my heart. It gave me grace, gratitude and a sense of inherent abundance. Quoting John Muir, “Wilderness takes you beyond your human existence to become one with nature and the universe.” As big as nature was, I began to see beauty in small things. To recapture and nurture this awareness, I became an artist.

Mountain Cabin Studio is the offspring of my retirement as an Interior Designer in 2010. After moving around the country, I lived in Southern California the last 8 years of my career. My daughter, starting out as an architect, convinced me to move there. She was completely sold on me working for an architectural firm. This was shortly before the worst housing crisis in history, especially in Southern California. She still lives and works there, married to an architect with two small children. After retiring, I moved to Western New York to live with my son and his wife, both engineers. I help care for their three little girls. Always hoping that when I retired I could pursue my art wholeheartedly and homesick for Montana, in the summer of 2013, I returned to Melrose to the family cabin to renovate and restore it. Everything we tried to do turned into a major problem. Instead of getting anything done we left the cabin torn apart unable to do the work as planned. As I created my crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to raise money for the restoration, I realized the potential for the cabin as an artist’s retreat and a sanctuary for physical, emotional and spiritual healing. As I researched retreats and art online, I found compelling information from studies, government and otherwise, documenting art’s healing powers.

This is my hope for Mountain Cabin Studio. To bring people to the awareness I first experienced in the wilderness as a child. To foster peace, fortitude and a sense of belonging. To promote physical, emotional and spiritual healing. To offer a sanctuary to those who want to reconnect and rekindle their spirit. To complement and reinforce this sense of grace and equanimity, we’ll offer artistic workshops to capture and express the serene grandeur and magnanimity of nature’s beauty and being. To go beyond human impermanence and it’s compulsive posturing of grasping, withholding and obsessing.