Crossroads Public Artboard Series & Process

Shared Ground

Adapted from original studio paintings, these paired works present quiet, face-to-face moments between humans and animals that invite reflection on care, curiosity, and coexistence. Through stillness and proximity, the images explore shared spaces where knowledge, responsibility, and ways of being with the natural world are passed gently from one generation to the next.

Visualizing the Composition

Placing these paintings onto billboards allows the story to unfold across space and scale, helping viewers immediately understand the relationship between the two works. On the left, the woman and the bear appear first, anchoring the composition and setting the tone. Their presence speaks to experience, memory, and guardianship, shaped by years spent in larger natural environments. The bear stands as a steady companion rather than a threat, and the woman meets it with calm familiarity, reflecting a learned responsibility to protect and live in balance with the natural world. This pairing represents tradition, knowledge gained over time, and the role of elders as caretakers of both land and animals.

On the right, the narrative shifts to the next generation. The child and raccoon reflect a life shaped within the city, where nature exists in closer, quieter, and more everyday forms. The raccoon, an urban animal, mirrors the child’s role as an observer, learning how to notice, respect, and coexist with the living world woven into streets, neighborhoods, and backyards. Together, the two billboards read as a continuum, moving from experience to curiosity, from guardianship to becoming, and from expansive wilderness to the intimate ecosystems of the city. Displayed at this scale, the works invite viewers to see themselves somewhere within that lineage and consider how care for nature is carried forward over time.

The Young Observer

Variegated Red & Green, Copper and Metal Leaf
Acrylic
Watercolor
Wood Canvas
Width 16”
Height 12”
Depth 1.5”
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This painting explores the quiet relationship between urban animals and the people who live alongside them. It focuses on care, attentiveness, and the knowledge passed gently from one generation to the next. A child and a raccoon meet face to face in a moment of stillness. Their shared gaze suggests trust, curiosity, and an awareness of one another within the same environment.

The work reflects how ways of caring for the natural world are learned over time. Respect for even the smallest companions of life is taught through observation, patience, and example. The raccoon, a familiar presence in urban landscapes, represents adaptability and intelligence. The child embodies openness, learning, and becoming.

Behind the figures, a winter forest unfolds. Bare ridge lines and vertical green trees create a sense of structure and rhythm. A golden sun sets along the horizon, marking the passage of time. The lines between the trees represent winter shadows cast by low sunlight stretching across the ridge. Together, these elements suggest seasonal change and continuity.

The figures and landscape come together to form a moment of quiet connection. The painting invites reflection on the relationship between people and animals, city and nature, and the ways care and knowledge are carried forward from one generation to the next.

Art + Billboard = Artboard

This image shows the artwork resized and composed specifically for the Crossroads Artboards, scaled to a 27′ × 14.5′ billboard format. The composition is intentionally stretched across the horizontal field, with the figures placed at opposite ends of the frame to create a measured pause between them. This expanded negative space allows their face-to-face relationship to read clearly and calmly from a distance, strengthening the sense of quiet exchange.

The child and raccoon are carefully rescaled to preserve realistic proportions while enhancing visibility at street level, ensuring their expressions and body language remain legible at an architectural scale. The wide format encourages the viewer’s eye to travel slowly across the surface, emphasizing stillness, anticipation, and shared presence. By adapting the painting specifically to the billboard dimensions rather than simply enlarging it, the layout reinforces a sense of intimacy within a monumental public context, allowing the work to feel both expansive and quietly personal.

The Quiet Guardian

22k Gold, Silver, Varigated Red & Green and Copper Metal Leaf
Aryclic Paint
Peal Ex
Wood Canvas
Width 36”
Height 48”
Depth 1.5”
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The Quiet Guardian presents a moment of silent understanding between a woman and a bear, their faces close, meeting eye to eye in a shared language beyond words. Neither dominates the other. Instead, they exist in balance, acknowledging mutual respect, trust, and protection. The bear stands as a guardian of the natural world, while the woman represents humanity’s responsibility to listen, learn, and care for the land rather than conquer it. Behind them, the landscape unfolds in layered color and water, suggesting time, memory, and the rhythms of nature that connect all living beings.

Her hair is rendered in silver leaf, chosen intentionally to represent an ageless figure. Though her face is youthful, the silver suggests wisdom accumulated over time, a visual metaphor for how knowledge is gained through reading, learning, and lived experience. She embodies the idea that a woman can carry the insight of generations regardless of age, that wisdom is not defined by years alone but by curiosity and openness to growth. The silver catches the light differently from every angle, reinforcing the idea that knowledge evolves, shifts, and deepens as one continues to learn.

The bear’s form incorporates layered textures and metallic elements, echoing the land itself and reinforcing its role as a timeless guardian. Together, the figures create a quiet but powerful narrative about protection, wisdom, and mutual respect. The Quiet Guardian invites viewers to pause, listen, and reflect on their own relationship with nature, knowledge, and the responsibility we all share in caring for the world around us.

Silver to Gold to Copper

This video captures a moment of stillness between human and animal, a shared gaze that speaks to trust, reflection, and kinship. As the camera moves, layered paint, metal leaf, and hand-drawn line shift subtly with the light, revealing texture and depth that change from every angle.

The bear and the young woman face one another as equals, connected through land, water, and sky. The surface holds quiet movement, ripples in the background echo the rhythm of breath, while metallic passages catch light and soften again. The work invites viewers to slow down, look closely, and consider the bond between inner strength, protection, and understanding across generations.

Art + Billboard = ArtBoard.

This exploration examines how the original studio paintings can be thoughtfully reimagined for a 27′ × 14.5′ ArtBoard format. Through careful testing of scale, cropping, and spatial relationships, the composition studies how focal points, figures, and surrounding environments shift when translated from an intimate, gallery-scale work to a wide, horizontal, public-facing surface. The goal is to preserve the emotional clarity, narrative balance, and visual hierarchy of the original paintings while allowing the expanded format to enhance their presence, legibility, and impact from a distance.

Once selected, the artwork would be fully recreated specifically for the ArtBoard dimensions rather than simply enlarged. Each painting would be redrawn and repainted to fit the 27′ × 14.5′ layout, ensuring proportions, negative space, and figure relationships are intentionally composed for the billboard scale. This approach allows for refinement of spacing, background continuity, and edge conditions so the final work feels native to the ArtBoard format, maintaining the integrity of the original paintings while optimizing them for architectural context, viewing distance, and public engagement.