Water has a habit of finding its way into my life.

That statement sounds more poetic than I intend it to, but it happens to be true. Rivers have shaped where I've worked, how I've traveled, what I've photographed, the communities I've become part of, and eventually the art I've created. Looking back, water appears again and again, threading its way through places and experiences that at first seemed unrelated.

For a long time, however, painting wasn't one of them.

Through high school and college, drawing and painting were simply part of who I was. Not a career path. Not a grand ambition. Just something I did — part of the same landscape as rivers, wildlife, and the outdoors.

Then, slowly and almost without noticing, they weren't.

There was no conscious decision to stop. Life simply filled the available space. But creativity never really disappeared. It found another outlet.

Photography became the place where that creative impulse continued to live and grow. A camera accompanied me on trips, field assignments, and river adventures. It taught me to observe, to pay attention, to look more closely at landscapes, wildlife, and the small details that often go unnoticed.

The medium had changed.

The impulse remained.

Then two things happened around the same time.

Brenda and I went to a paint-and-sip. Hardly the stuff of artistic origin stories. There was no lightning bolt — just an enjoyable evening and a quiet reminder that I had once enjoyed making things with paint.

And whitewater entered the picture.

At first, kayaking and painting seemed to have very little in common. One involved rapids, currents, and learning how not to swim unexpectedly. The other involved paper, brushes, and pigments, and trying to figure out why watercolor seemed determined to do exactly what it wanted regardless of my plans.

One was noisy.

One was quiet.

But they were teaching remarkably similar lessons.

A beginner's instinct in whitewater is to dominate the river — paddle harder, correct more aggressively, fight the current. The river rarely responds well to that. Progress comes through understanding. Understand the current, understand what the water is doing and why, and only then does control begin to emerge.

Watercolor behaves much the same way. The more you try to impose complete control, the less interesting the result often becomes. Understand the water, understand the paint, and only then does something worth keeping appear on the page.

Both rewarded observation. Both punished overcorrection. Both worked best with equal parts intention and humility.

And paying attention has consequences.

Once you begin noticing things, it becomes increasingly difficult not to respond to them. Observation creates its own momentum. The more attention you pay, the more connections you see, and the stronger the urge becomes to make something from them.

A bend in a river.

A heron standing motionless at the water's edge.

A shrimp boat moving offshore at sunrise.

A fisherman balanced on a rock in midstream.

A student catching an eddy for the first time.

For me, creativity rarely begins with a desire to create. It begins with attention. Something catches my eye, lingers, refuses to leave. Then comes the urge to respond — sometimes as a photograph, sometimes a painting, sometimes a story, a film, a sketch, or an idea that grows into something larger than expected.

The medium changes.

The impulse remains.

WaterMarks is not really a collection of watercolor paintings. It's evidence that curiosity was still there — that the desire to make things had not disappeared, only changed course.

Looking back, I don't think the most important thing was learning to paint in watercolor or learning to paddle whitewater.

The important thing was rediscovering a part of myself I had nearly forgotten was there.

The rivers and the paint simply happened to be the way back.