“It is this daily life we live, the nature of ourselves and our world, that so excites me when standing before my canvas— life’s vital creation that is my source of inspiration and humility.”A couple of years out of high school, Packard was making a living as a technical writer. One day while he was in downtown Boise for a business meeting, he saw a posterannouncing a weeklong painting workshop given by an artist whose work he admired. Then he saw another workshop advertised and decided to sign up for both, back to back. “The urge to do art had never gone away, but art schools wereexpensive, and I didn’t want to go into debt,” he recounts. “So when I learnedabout the workshops, I was elated—it was the working man’s way to do it.”Today Packard expresses his love for the natural world in vibrant, richly huedlandscapes, seascapes, and still lifes, especially florals. For a number of years hispainting was characterized by a loose, traditional, wet-on-wet approach. A couple of years ago he began exploring another way of conveying this same sense of pulsating color and shimmering light. Using the broken-color method developed by Monet and other late-19th-century French Impressionists, Packard produces the effect of a single color by applying layers of paint and numerous hues side by side in short, thick strokes.“When you’re close to something, like painting, you can’t help but correlate it with other aspects of life,” he reflects. “It’s how you see the world. I see the world through my family—my two children and beautiful wife—and painting. It’s all there.”