Kevin Macpherson has been running toward the horizon since he was a kid. As a teenager, he hitchhiked across the country with $10 in his pocket. At the start of his marriage, he and his wife spent their honeymoon in Ireland — for six months, funded by everything Macpherson owned: $5,000, spent down to the last $10 before they came home and started over. “Our whole life is pretty much like that,” he says. It’s a rhythm he’s repeated for decades, and one he credits as central to his creative life: for roughly eight months out of every year across his career, Macpherson has traveled to paint.

For Macpherson, travel isn’t a break from the work — it’s the engine behind it. “The travel to new places, for me, inspires me just to see differently, and be exposed to new things that kind of make me want to paint,” he says. New surroundings sharpen attention in a way familiar ones can’t. He’s quick to note that staying home works fine for artists who have something inspiring them daily. But for him, unfamiliar ground creates urgency: “It makes me feel like, okay, I’m here just today — I better take advantage of it.”

“Shanghai” (oil, 24 x 36 in.) by Kevin Macpherson

He compares it to the intensity of a short vacation, when a limited timeframe pushes people to make the most of every day, “going full storm” for a week before resting once they’re back home. Macpherson tries to hold onto that same urgency even on a month-long trip, treating every single day, not just the first few, like something not to waste. “For painting, that really helps a lot,” he says.

For Macpherson, the stimulation of a new landscape isn’t incidental to his art — it’s the source of it. Decades of near-constant travel haven’t just taken him to new places to paint. They’ve kept him painting like someone still discovering, for the first time, what’s worth looking at.

Kevin Machperson painting in China

If Macpherson’s right that unfamiliar ground is where the best painting happens, there may be no better test of that theory than PleinAir Magazine’s upcoming trip to China — and Macpherson himself will be there. Travelers will paint alongside him in landscapes unlike anything most Western artists have encountered, the kind of genuinely new terrain he credits with sharpening his eye for over 50 years. Learn more and reserve your spot.