Artist Notes: The Goldilocks Lakehouses and Light That Feels Just Right
There are some subjects that feel less like a choice and more like a return. For me, lakehouses are like that.
I have always been an artist, and I have always loved water. I grew up on the lake, fishing and swimming and camping, with that particular kind of childhood freedom that seems to live forever in the body. I also grew up in houses where interiors mattered, where beauty at home mattered, where paintings of pretty landscapes with a house tucked somewhere inside them could set my imagination spinning for a long time. We did not have computers or endless feed scrolling then. We had rooms, pictures, stories, and daydreams. And I was very good at daydreaming.
One of my favorite stories as a child was Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I think that story stayed with me for more reasons than I realized. There is something so human about moving through a world of choices and quietly asking: which one feels right? Which one feels like me? Which one would I want to step into and stay awhile?
This spring, during a trip to Lake Keowee in northwestern South Carolina, that old feeling came back in a fresh way. I found myself looking at the lakeside houses and imagining different lives inside them. Not in a grand real-estate way, but in a storybook way. This one is too big. This one is too small. This one is just right. That little Goldilocks instinct woke right up in me, and it followed me back to the studio.
These paintings are not portraits of one exact place. They are partly remembered and partly imagined, though they are shaped by the visual language I know so well from Norris Lake and highland reservoir country. The steep banks, the coves, the quiet water, the feeling of a house tucked into the trees just above the shoreline. Those details live in me, and they seem to come out whether I invite them or not.
What interests me most is not simply the architecture of lakehouses, but what they represent. To me, they suggest a life built with care. They suggest family, peace, a certain earned beauty. They feel like places where people have worked hard, loved deeply, gathered often, and made room for calm. A lakehouse is never just a house. It is almost always an idea about life.
That is part of what brought this trio together.
Lakehouse in Honey Light has a classic, welcoming presence. I was drawn to the white-painted house and that soft end-of-day glow, the kind of golden light that makes everything seem briefly more tender. It feels openhearted to me, like the house that knows how to hold a crowd and still feel intimate.
Dockside Cabin in Morning Light has a different mood altogether. It is quieter, cooler, closer to the beginning of things. I love the way the morning light just begins to touch the roofline, and how the lake feels only a few steps away. There is something very immediate about it, as if the day has not quite started speaking yet.
And then there is Viridian Cove with Gold Bank, which may be the most inward of the three. This one stays with me. It feels shaded and calm, almost like a private retreat for gathering your thoughts. If the first painting invites and the second awakens, this one listens. It is the one I most want to enter and sit with for a while.
Light is always part of the story for me. I love all kinds of light, and some of my favorite real-life moments happen in the middle of the day, but as a painter I find that morning and evening give me more to work with. They let a house become emotional. They let the water speak back. They create atmosphere, and atmosphere is often where the painting begins to breathe.
Maybe that is why these lakehouses feel so alive to me. They are not just structures on a shoreline. They are vessels for imagination. As a child, I looked into paintings and wandered around inside them. I think I still do. Only now, instead of disappearing into someone else’s painted house, I get to make my own.
And perhaps that is the quiet thread tying this trio together: not simply lake life, not simply beauty, but the old, enduring question of which place feels most like home.
I hope that when people see this trio together for the first time, “they get a little excited trying to imagine which one is just right for them.”
That, to me, is part of the fun and part of the feeling. A little playful, a little personal, a little wistful. Not every lakehouse is the one. But every now and then, one catches the light in just the right way, sits above the water just so, and opens a little door in the imagination.
And when that happens, you know. —Rachel
