How My Mother Taught Me to Truly Savor Life

My mother was a relatively well-known artist in the Pacific Northwest. Over the course of her career, her painting evolved considerably, with the highly figurative watercolors of her early days giving way to composite works. One constant, however, remained: the excellence of her technique.

When I was younger, I also drew a little, and I enjoyed it, but I didn't have the same talent. So one day I asked my mother how I could improve. I expected her to say something like, "Practice at least 10,000 hours." Instead, she advised me to look at what I wanted to draw. I was amazed. Obviously, I was already doing it, I told her.

“Probably not ,” she explained. “Most people never really look at things carefully. They glance at something and then rely on their brain to fill in the gaps — which it doesn’t do well, so it produces bad drawings.” So I did as she advised: I looked long and hard at what I was planning to draw, in this case a tree. I realized then that I was noticing much more detail in its outlines, its colors, its shadows. I re