My main medium is watercolor with micron pen, but I always love experimenting with other media as well.

Uncommon Goodness

I painted this shortly after my father died. For my mom, for my brothers and our spouses, for his grandchildren. I wanted to express somehow the profundity of the gratitude and pain inspired by having known and lost such a man as Dan Kemper was.

We know what it means
To have been loved
By someone of
_Uncommon goodness. _

About

M. Kemper Westbrook

I have no formal art training. I'm self taught and my work usually reflects a mood or thoughts I'm mulling over. My background is in literature and education. For most of my adult life, I've thought of myself as an English teacher and writer. During the early days of the pandemic, with four young sons at home and a husband in graduate school, I found that painting with my boys' Crayola watercolor sets was incredibly soothing in a very stressful time. I have painted almost every day since then. When my father died late in 2020, I began adding drawings and snippets of poetry on top of my paintings to help me sort through my grief. Now I am weaving together my education background into my art and have been teaching workshops on painting, poetry, and creativity for children and adults. I'm so thankful for the outlet painting has provided for me, and I'm so touched when I learn that my work resonates with others.

M. Kemper Westbrook

describes their creative process

I still think of myself as a writer/poet as much an artist. I have big feelings, and like a good English teacher, I find symbolism and metaphor in so many things, and my art usually expresses that in some way. I usually choose my color palette based on my mood (or sometimes what I *want* my mood to be). Then I start painting-- just laying the colors down however seems right. Once I've done that, I come back to the painting and usually just start drawing without a plan. Then I stare at it for a long time. Sometimes a poem comes to me, sometimes not. If it does, I'll play with the wording for a little while and then find a place to put it on the painting. A lot of time this process results in something that I'm glad I made, but don't particularly care for as an object in its own right. But sometimes it ends up feeling like a really lovely distillation of a moment in time.

Discover the creative processes of all of our artists interviewed so far...