We often dream of traveling to distant places to find inspiration, yet beauty is waiting for us right outside our door. As Blaise Pascal once observed, “The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Drawing or painting our surroundings forces us to slow down and look again, not with the dull familiarity of daily habit, but with the freshness of someone seeing it for the first time.

The magic of travel isn’t just in faraway destinations; it’s in the way travel trains us to notice details that we might ignore at home. Art is a way to bring that same attentiveness to our own streets, lakes, gardens and skies. When we sketch the curve of a tree or the shadow across a familiar path, we rescue our own neighborhood from invisibility and allow it to shimmer again with meaning.

Our group shall gather with this spirit, not to chase glory or the exotic, but to learn how to see the ordinary as extraordinary. Together, we turn Sanctuary Lakes into a studio and in the process each week, find that the place we live in is as worthy of appreciation EVERY DAY as exotic destinations we may fly to, a few times a year.