Hi! Welcome to this space! I am so glad that you are here. My name is Shauna, and I love beautiful things. I also love things that are real and honest and natural, and I see those things all around me.

I am inexplicably drawn to beauty. I always have been. I need to be in and around beautiful things, and I feel like I can’t fully settle or breathe unless I am. Because of this, I have always loved art— primarily painting. I love the feeling of the brush mixing with the paint and then moving along the canvas, and often find myself surprised at what ends up appearing before me. Creating art never goes the way that I think it is going to go, which sometimes feels disappointing. It is hard to remember that creating art is a process, but it is. It is not an easy endeavor to create beautiful things, though looking at the finished product might make people think that the process was easy. There is a lot of toil and hard work (and often tears!) that goes into the birthing of each new painting. It is a constant work of making and re-making. I love this about painting, and realize that people are like this too— we are constantly in the process of being made and then re-made again.

“We do not want merely to *see* beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words— to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”

— CS Lewis, *Weight of Glory*

I have come to believe that life is a journey, that along the way we are constantly being made new, and that beauty is one of the restorative things that helps us along in this process.

I want to share my journey with you, not just the finished product. My hope and dream is that this space will be one filled with beautiful things that are constantly in progress. That my work will show by rootedness and growth, hospitality and adventure.

I think that nature is beautiful, but I also think that people and their stories are beautiful. I hope that my art work will help tell my story of growth and transformation, but I hope that through my writing and processing and inviting you in that you will also experience growth and transformation as well.

I believe that art allows us to experience truths about God that we don’t get to experience in our churches. When we only use our heads in thinking about God we miss out on the beauty and fullness of what he has created and how he desires for us to experience it. Art allows us to experience creation in a new way which allows us to see the world in a different way. God created us to create, so we miss so much of the goodness of who he is when we are not truly seeing the beautiful things that he has created. When I paint, I suddenly become more aware of the way that the light touches the leaves or the color of the grass in the full sun, or reflection of the trees in the water. Because I was created by the great Creator, I feel so much more full and so much more complete when I am creating as well. We are created to create along with him! And whether you are an artist, or a lover of beauty, or someone who is busy but wants to notice beauty, I invite you to take some time to do that.

I believe that beauty is healing, and that creating beauty has a huge capacity to heal. Light does overcome darkness, beauty can overcome pain, and using all of your embodied senses in the act of creating something can help heal things that are broken inside you. I don’t just feel called to paint and bring beauty into the world, but I feel called to help others use beauty to find healing as well.

I am a painter, and I am also a spiritual director. I would love to sit with you, create beauty with you, and help you see and hear and touch and taste and smell the presence of God in your life. He is there, and he gave us all five of our senses so that we could more fully and totally experience him in and with our bodies. As a spiritual director, it is my goal and honor to create a space that allows us to be present in your body so that you can recognize God’s presence with us. We will spend time in silence noticing the things that we experience with our senses— what do we hear? What do we smell? What do we feel? What do we sense inside of ourselves? What is God saying to us or showing us? Our space and our time are sacred, and I look forward to bearing witness to God’s presence with you.

Hi! Welcome to this space! I am so glad that you are here. My name is Shauna, and I love beautiful things. I also love things that are real and honest and natural, and I see those things all around me.

“We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words— to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”

I have come to believe that life is a journey, that along the way we are constantly being made new, and that beauty is one of the restorative things that helps us along in this process.

I want to share my journey with you, not just the finished product. My hope and dream is that this space will be one filled with beautiful things that are constantly in progress. That my work will show by rootedness and growth, hospitality and adventure.

Follow my journey: