Tessa Greene O’Brien grew up in Maine, on a property containing marshes, fields, meadows, gardens, and forest. Today, she tries to capture her home state’s sense of “mystery, magic, and the sublime” in her art while shying away from “total nostalgia”—“I’ll paint wherever I am,” she says. O’Brien, who now lives in South Portland, Maine, began painting full-time about a decade ago. “My practice is closely tied to observation, but there’s a layer of atmosphere and memory and emotion that I want to infuse,” she says. She considers herself a landscape painter but also works in still life. Recently, several of her finished works were part of a group exhibition, As We Are, at the Portland Museum of Art.