Growing up inside New York’s postwar art world gave Gina Sawin an extraordinary education. But becoming her own artist required something else: getting away from the center of it.

In Maine, Sawin found the space to develop a painting practice rooted in birds, the natural world, and the delicate ecosystems her husband, conservationist Charles Gauvin, taught her to see more closely. Her paintings may appear to capture a flock observed in flight, but Sawin reveals that they are carefully constructed—composed to create the feeling of something that never existed exactly as painted.

She and Lisa also consider the ancient human impulse to depict animals, from 25,000-year-old cave paintings to Sawin’s contemporary birds, and why solitude is only part of an artist’s life. Even alone in the studio, Sawin says, generations of teachers and artists remain present.