(serene music) (water plashes) (bird chirps) - When I'm in nature, I really love finding patterns.

(bird chirps) (leaves rustle) I was always really obsessed with the environment around me.

It was always a visual fascination with the natural world- (water whooshes) and also I just love being outside.

(water whooshes) (peaceful music) My name is Lindsey Fox and I do watercolor painting that primarily focuses in landscape and abstraction.

In nature, it's never the exact same thing twice.

The way that I work with watercolor mimics that.

What inspires me are rocks, mountains, craggy peaks.

Basically just anything that includes patterns.

I don't really like when things look exactly how they're supposed to.

Often, you'll see that vista.

You won't necessarily see the rock that I'm most intrigued by, or the light or the color relationship.

(water whooshes) Abstraction allows me to exclude what I don't really care about and include what I really do.

(water whooshes) What attracts me to this particular spot is not only the waterfall, but mostly the rocks that are around it, so that's really the energy that I'm trying to capture here.

(water whooshes) I grew up in Northern Michigan in the lower part of the Mitten on a peninsula that basically was a lot of farmland, a lot of waterfront, a lot of dunes.

That kind of fostered my love for patterns and patterns in nature.

My dad is a sculptor.

I've always really been drawn to abstraction because of the way that my dad's work is made.

In our work, you'll often see our color palettes really relate.

Abstraction is so much harder than just representing something, because you're taking all of these different elements and you're deciding what happens.

(spirited music) (footsteps patter) I moved to Portland in 2013.

It was right after I graduated from college.

I really wanted to explore the landscape.

It's so inspiring.

It's just mind-blowing.

And I feel much more supported in the arts here.

(faucet whooshes) (objects clatter) I began working at Nike in 2015 as a contractor.

It was a great job, but there was a point where I was starting to not be able to pursue creative projects in my own work.

I started to feel like in order to push myself with my own work, I needed to let that other full-time job go.

Eventually, this kind of eclipsed it.

I moved into a larger studio in 2021 and I just realized that I wanted to be here more and I wanted to paint more.

Working for yourself, there are a lot of anxieties that come with that.

I grew up with two artists as parents, and so it's terrifying doing your own thing.

(water plashes) (gentle music) Watercolor is really soft, and when you layer it and layer it and layer it, it becomes really bold.

At the beginning, I always paint.

Working with a big brush, that's kind of how I create the composition.

(gentle music) I'll start to add in more layers- (gentle music) and include more elements.

Once that composition is resolved, I'll start to think about how I want to add ink.

It's a really meditative process.

(pen taps) (pen continues tapping) Pen and ink is almost kind of a way of cheating watercolor.

It's a way of adding more texture and more points of interest.

I decided that I was starting to care less about what the landscape looked like in my painting and more about individual pieces in the landscape.

I didn't care that it looked like what it was supposed to look like.

I cared that it felt like what I saw.

(ethereal music) When I'm in a flow state, if I make a mistake, it doesn't matter.

It's a part of it.

(ethereal music) (ethereal music continues) (ethereal music continues) That flow state is really important because I'll discover a different mark that interacts with the piece in a different way that I didn't notice or that I didn't plan.

(ethereal music) (ethereal music continues) Painting these is like experiencing little blips of nature rather than bigger moments.

(inspiring music) I really want to create a body of work that speaks to the concepts that I want to talk about.

(inspiring music) (inspiring music continues) I want to encourage people while they're outside in nature to not have it just be about what's at the end.

Have it be about that experience, and what that feels like, and what that does for you.

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