Only once a year does the Holyoke Mountain Range turn that ruby red that I so love to draw. But now I have to accept the turning of the season that flips the mountains back into their burnished siennas and umber-oranges. The winds and rains...
I am painting much better than a few weeks ago when I spent most the time scraping back down to surface at the end of each day. I was trying to paint the lava flow of 100 square miles, 40 feet deep, from Malpais,...
Leaving the lush yellow-green beginnings of spring for the New Mexico desert brought enormous challenges. After long travel, including a 7 hour flight, (haggling with the car rental agency employer about the ‘toy’ matchbox compact car’ offered me, of which I could not see the...
Good painting comes from the pure pleasure of touching paint and moving it with brushes and pallet knives, mixing it to the exact color range of cools and warms. (I was unable to touch paint for a few months even though I was always drawing....
One has to be a very healthy, strong person to 'just hold tight' while listening to branches crashing onto the side of the house, then thumping heavily onto the earth, one branch after the other, not knowing if a window would be hit or the...
My least favorite job is building stretchers. The corners have to be exactly right-angled and there are 6 paintings to build. I got three corners perfect and then one is off. I fix that one and the others are off. Finally all corners are...
The sky got really so dark that I could not see color, late afternoon. By sunset the heavy rain had stopped and I was able to go for my usual sunset walk. Upon my return, I ran back into the barn to look at...
"Yesterday we walked between rainstorms along the shores of Goats Neck Beach and then Wrights Beach. I loved one beach right after the other. Goat’s has the mouth of the Russian River running into the ocean. Birds float on it’s current like little kids going...
Mid-day was warm enough, but then as the sun suddenly dropped at 4pm, coldness set in quickly before I was finished drawing, crayons dropping from frozen fingers that did not even seem to belong to me. I never quite remember the light being as sharp...
always being born...