I like to think of my art as an ongoing dialogue with other artists and with nature.

Nature has always been a fertile topic for these conversations. I live in Humboldt County, California, where my wife and I regularly walk in the redwood forest behind our house. Years of making art have changed the way I experience those walks. Painting landscapes taught me to notice how coastal fog obscures distant trees, how colors lose saturation across space, and how sunlight moves through branches. When I'm painting flowers, I suddenly notice every bush blooming along the road. When I'm working with birds, my ears tune into their calls and my eyes follow every movement in the underbrush.

That relationship with nature grew partly out of another change in my life. I came of age in the 1980s and early '90s, influenced by punk and alternative culture and by the philosophical and spiritual questions of my Unitarian upbringing. In college, I began meditating and exploring Buddhist philosophy. It offered a way to step outside the constant flow of ideas and to experience the world in a more direct way.

Nature is present and alive in a way that isn't about words. It just is.

The more time I spent paying attention to the living world, the more I felt fed by it. Real sunlight glowing through leaves does something to me that anything illuminated on a computer screen can't. Over time, making art from nature has become a core part of my relationship with it. Sunlight inspires a feeling of grace, which might inspire a series of paintings—and making those paintings teaches me to see the sunlight differently.

When I paint a bird, plant, person, or landscape, I'm not simply trying to reproduce its appearance. I'm looking for the particular beauty or presence I find there. I edit the image, removing distractions, exaggerating what seems important, and using color, line, shape, and composition to distill the experience. I'm trying to create a kind of visual poetry that might help another person notice something they otherwise would have passed by.

Years ago, I stood in front of a Van Gogh painting in a museum and had the immediate sensation that I wasn't simply looking at a road he had painted—I was looking down that road through his eyes. The psychological intensity of the way he saw the world was suddenly an experience I was having. Someone who had been dead for generations felt intensely present in me. For a moment, I felt vividly connected to another person's experience of being alive.

Experiences like this have changed what I believe an artwork can do. An image made with passion and attention can carry something of one person's encounter with the world into another person's life.

That's also why I still care about making physical things. Making art fosters a relationship with my own heart. There is something intimate about nurturing an artwork into life. When I live with the many pieces I've made, I feel little hits of the original inspiration from the days I made them. It's like a journal of experiences with nature.

Oddly enough, I sometimes feel something similar when I put on one of my shirts. I'd like my work to remind someone to open their heart to the nature around them.

I don't see those changes as departures from my practice anymore. The exploration is the practice.

Wrenwear grew naturally out of that exploration. I loved making artwork on my computer and iPad, and putting those images on clothing freed them from some of the baggage and expectations I had come to associate with fine art. Making art for shirts could bring my creativity into the day to day life of someone on the other side of the world.

But I also wanted this particular creative project to be useful beyond my own artistic life. I had supported Trees for the Future in the small ways I could for roughly twenty years. Eventually I began wondering what might happen if I put more of my creative skills to work for that cause. I was inspired in part by Paul Newman's example of using a salad dressing business to raise millions of dollars for children's charities.

That's a large part of what Wrenwear is about for me: using creativity to give something back.

In some ways, I think of this period as a sabbatical from the conventional pursuit of an art career. I'm learning how to build something that can support a cause I care about and bring a community together to make a difference in a way that I have never been able to do on my own.

After more than 35 years, I'm less interested in deciding what kind of artist I'm supposed to be. I want to follow the questions that still fascinate me, make the art I feel compelled to make, and pay close attention to the world while I still have life left to celebrate it.