Travel, art, and the slow beauty of living intentionally.
I'm Lily Mae. I make watercolor paintings, mostly of coastlines and small ordinary things, and I travel a lot — mostly to the same handful of places, over and over. This is a show about staying longer than you should, seeing a place for what it actually is instead of the version you were sold, and what happens to your creative work when you slow down enough to look. No highlight reels. No hidden-gem hunting. Just paying attention.
I got home from a trip last spring and within four days I made the best painting I'd made in almost a year — not because I'd gotten better in eleven days, but because something had passed through me on the way home and left it there. It wasn't a painting of anywhere exotic. It was the light through my own front window on a chipped white bowl with two limes in it, a bowl I'd walked past every day for two years and never once seen.
The first time I felt like I was actually in Hawaii, I was lost — turned around on a back road on the east side, no signal, the road suddenly running through somebody's real life, with trucks in the yards and a small white church and old men in plastic chairs outside a store. I'd been to the islands twice before that and I don't think I'd really been there at all. I'd seen the postcard. I'd never seen the island.
There's a town on the east side of Maui where the road runs out before the island does, and one Wednesday night I sat on the steps of a rented room and realized I wasn't ready to leave. So I moved the flight, annoyed a few people back home, and stayed three more days. Those three days are the reason I remember the trip at all.