My mom was an artist, and I grew up in a world rich with color, perfumed with turpentine and linseed oil, stacked with books, and softly serenaded by the local classical music radio station. I was given unlimited access to a large collection of art books and quizzed on hues during nature walks.  What colors are in that shadow? (Hint: Not gray.) Allowed to lurk in Mom’s painting classes and pilfer her art supplies, I filled piles of sketchbooks with the seen and the imagined. The magic of a blank page that could be made into anything I could concoct was intoxicating.

Eventually, this evolved into an interest in painting on “recycled” objects as well as canvas. Coached to appreciate random beauty peeping through a window or lighting a face, nurtured on images from Vermeer to Van Gogh, from Bemelmans to Sendak, I never outgrew the sheer joy of beautiful colors, shapes, and lines in all their endless variety. I still feel magic bubbling beneath the surface of our workaday world. Like Lewis’s wardrobe that leads to Narnia, I believe the ordinary contains the extraordinary.

So why not paint this into reality—functional art? A chair-shaped chunk of the universe, a koi pond on a picnic table, a foggy garden on a desk, a midnight fairy dance hidden in a wooden bowl, your cat exploring the Amazon on a bookshelf; whatever makes you smile.