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...
At 4:40 am when I got up to get ready for bed, (having fallen asleep dressed), I heard the first birdsong of the morning: one crystal clear 'full-sentence' undulating melody. Within minutes came a myriad of call-and response songs from all sides of my house...
The staff at the Funeral Home is beginning to look like relatives. I hope we don't have to return for a good long while yet. My sister pointed to where I have a plot; she said she'd 'be right next to me,' to which I...