Letters
Letters are sent first, by email to subscribers.
The Borrowed Studio
Letter #4 - August 2026
For a few weeks I’ve been working in a borrowed studio, a room on the ground floor with stone walls and a ceiling that disappears on a dark day. Two hundred years of salt have come through these walls. The harbor is on the other side of them, and I’m sure, a few ghosts.
I brought some of the small paintings down with me, the ones made in the field this year in Iceland, Montana and the water at the end of my own street.
The idea was to bring them here to finish, but sometimes small things have big ideas and they started asking for more room instead.
I’ve spent this year standing in front of things that made me feel small… lightning storms, moody mountains, blue-black open water. I keep going back for that feeling.
I don’t fully understand it yet, but I’ve stopped pretending it isn’t the reason. For the paintings to hold it, I have to be able to stand in front of them the way I stood in front of the weather… I have to feel small.
So I’ve been building the largest surfaces I’ve ever worked on.
Some mornings I leave the door open and the harbor comes in. Wind all afternoon, salt in everything. It feels right that the paintings should breathe the same air as the water that started them.
The keys to this studio go back soon. What happens before then, I don’t fully know yet.
-E.C. Baugh
Field Studies
Letter #3 - August 2026
Over the past several months I've been living with a group of small paintings that slowly accumulated while working in Montana, Iceland, and New York.
The strange thing about small paintings is they rarely stay small.
I thought these were simply things to remember later. Bits of weather. A hill.
A horse. A room that seemed quieter than it should have been.
One evening I hung them all across the studio wall together.
They weren't remembering anything.
They'd been pointing somewhere the whole time.
I've been living with them long enough to now realize they were having a conversation a little too large to be such small works.
- E.C. Baugh
Montana
Letter #2 - July 2026
In June we drove into Montana to meet the weather, Genevieve, a dancer, a storm expert, a photographer, and me, with an easel strapped down in the truck like a piece of old farm equipment that had made a few questionable decisions in life.
In that wide part of the country, you can see a supercell coming from forty miles out. It almost walks. The grain bins go silver, the power lines start talking, and the land lies down flat and polite like it's done this before.
The goal was to stay ahead of them so we were doing 90mph past the cows, down the old dirt roads. We'd stop. I'd throw my old easel in the grass and paint for 10 or 15 minutes until the rain suggested we should leave, then rush back in the truck and back to 90. It was like this all day until it was too dark to see the canvas in any way other than lightening bursts.
I went in expected fear. I'd even planned on it. I thought it was going to be the subject.
Instead came an enormous, inexplicable calm.
It was like a blanket of blue-black wrapping around the landscape. Warm pressure pressing down on the earth. A deep purr from the sky reminding us of its greatness.
It was the safest I have ever felt.
l've been trying to paint that feeling that ever since.
-E.C. Baugh
Photograph by Keith Ladzinski. Montana, June 2026.
Iceland
Letter #1 - January 2026
Cold, cold, cold, but all the cozier. During a recent trip to Iceland, and what was meant to be a relaxing, much needed vacation between major projects, I found myself unexpectedly full of inspiration.
I shouldn't be surprised as I extended my first trip to Iceland by three weeks due to the overwhelming amount of creative ideas that struck me while being there. Since this trip was supposed to be one in mostly darkness, (there are only 3 full hours of sunlight during Icelandic winter) my plans consisted of hot spring siestas, warm food, catching up on the 14 books I read only the first chapter of, and much needed sleep. But as ALWAYS, the powers that be decided to flip the table on my plans, which manifested itself through plein-air studies in small scale.
Most often for me, a painting is the result of overthinking, hard work, planning, failure, corrections and more overthinking, all driven out of a desire to express some sort of something that therapy can't seem to heal. But in this case, I found myself painting more within an inhalation, an almost playful poking rather than deliberate intensity.
The resulting seven paintings from this trip have surprised me in that they were not the result of some demons I was wrestling with, nor were they the result of my overthinking, overworking, over caffeinated self. They exist on a plain much the way a fire flickers on a cold night, cracking and coughing puffs of scented smoke, feeling a little ominous and yet calming to the nerves in the deepest way.
-E.C. Baugh
