HEATHER HINES, PhD
Heather Hines is a clinical social worker based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As a child, she coped with early emotional turbulence by drawing fantastical creatures, using art to build internal cohesion. That impulse still drives her practice today.
Her work draws from dreams, emotional states, and the natural world, shaped by the vivid colors and stark beauty of the Southwestern landscape. She is especially inspired by a desire to celebrate the enduring beauty of nature in the face of ecological crisis. Her imagery is inspired by moments of deep connection amid uncertainty and change.
Heather works with individuals, families, and groups, and currently facilitates support groups focused on climate distress and the impact of patriarchy. She came to formal art and psychology studies in her mid-thirties, after teaching abroad in Europe, Asia, and Mexico. She is currently writing a book on abandonment trauma in the age of hyperreality.
On the weekends, she finds joy and renewal in trail running, hiking in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and cooking Moroccan food with her partner, Doug.
Love in Autumn
(Watercolor, 32” x 20”)
Love in Autumn is a celebration of love that emerges later in life, grounded, generous, and deeply present. Like the turning of the seasons, it carries both the wisdom of what has passed and the beauty of what continues to unfold.
The aspens that frame the painting are not solitary trees but part of a vast rhizome, a single living organism enduring beneath the soil. A vast grove of fluttering aspens rise in the Sangre de Cristo mountains because of fire. In 1893 a blaze swept through and cleared the Douglas firs, creating space for these aspens to flourish. Their presence is a living reminder that devastation can open the way for renewal, and that what looks like an ending may prepare the ground for unexpected beginnings.
In this way, the painting honors not only the resilience of nature but the resilience of the human heart. Just as fire made space for the aspens, life’s earlier upheavals can make space for a deeper and steadier form of love to appear, a love that is reciprocal, rooted, and wholehearted.
Love in Autumn reminds me of the potentiality and uncertainty woven into the natural world and into our own lives. Out of fire and endings, beauty and connection can arise. Out of autumn’s ripening, a wildflower meadow still blooms.