October at the Ghost Ranch

November 29, 2010 - Ridgway, Colorado

October 9, 2010 - Abiquiu, New Mexico

On the Painted Desert Road at the Ghost Ranch

WALKING AMONG TREES

This SUBTERRANEAN series of four mixed media works on will be on exhibit at the Stronghouse Studio Gallery in Telluride, Colorado. The show includes the work I did at the Vermont Studio Center in April of 2010 and is sponsored by an Artists Fellowship from the Telluride Council on the Arts and Humanities. You can hear more about the show and the Artist in Residence experience at www.tellurideinside.com - see direct link on links list.

THE NEXT DAY'S PAINTING

Painting with Douglass off the highway. This great morning view of good rock formations. So good to be in New Mexico painting again. Looking forward to Ghost Ranch next month.

STOPPING BY THE CABIN ON A WINDY AFTERNOON

A quick trip to Santa Fe to see the show at the O"Keeffe museum, I had to

detour and stop by the cabin at Ghost Ranch to make a drawing.

It was too windy to stay outside for long.

I was glad to see the early abstract paintings by O'Keeffe, especially the room of watercolors.

A WAY IN AND A WAY OUT

Avery Mountain from Gothic

Drawing a way to go on paper,

A path, a clearing

A way in and

A way out.

Independence, Cottonwood, Kebler, Hilliard, Scofield, Cinnamon, Halfmoon

Painting up in Gothic, near Crested Butte last month,

I kept thinking of mountain passes,

a path between two mountains that allows the crossing of a mountain chain,

usually the highest point on that route. Also called a gap, col or saddle.

DRAWN FROM NATURE - The Plant Lithographs of Ellsworth Kelly

One of the best things about painting in Telluride for that week the beginning of July was ducking into the Wilkinson Library to get out of the rain and finding this book of plant drawings by Ellsworth Kelly. I had seen a few before but this is the complete collection of

the lithographs he did from the drawings.

More July Plein Air Painting

An amazing view of Lizard Head can be seen from the "front yard" the High Camp Cabin!

And this is the other direction. Looking toward the basin where Round Lake is located.

You can see actual photos of this high-altitude landscape at their website - go to links.

Plein Air July 2010

A view of Grayhead from Deep Creek Road on the way to Telluride on June 26.

The first painting of two weeks of plein air painting ending in an exhibition for

Sheridan Arts Foundation in Telluride and the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen.
An intimate view of the creek at the Weller Lake Trailhead on the way to

Independence Pass in Aspen, Colorado.

June 22, 2010

Drawing trees, on a walk, the direction and movement of their limbs, interconnected, and the shapes of the spaces they make. These drawings often are the start for a studio painting.

"The walk magnified is the journey" - the big landscape and then the closeness of a tree.

COLORADO LANDSCAPE
I found A POEM IS A WALK by A.R. Ammons - "I take the walk to be the externalization of an

interior seeking...".

There are many drawings done on walks in these books that I carry with me. So much looking,

then really seeing something, and then making a drawing.

June 15, 2010

The land and the aspen tree has been the focus of my work for the last ten years.

Flowers, Birds and Landscapes

Last week in San Francisco at a great bookstore, Forest Books on 16th Street in the Mission I found a catalog from a show at the Berkeley Art Museum. What I read about Ch'en Hung-shou (1598-1652) and his paintings in Album of Flowers, Birds and Landscape speaks to work completed at my residency at the Vermont Studio Center:

"... conscious, highly sophisticated distortions of form and scale as a manifestation of stylistic virtuosity. The other leaves in the album attest to the same originality, ostensibly following very old traditions but in fact achieving ironic commentary on those traditions through calculated distortions. In these the artist singles out a subject and depicts it with extreme, almost obsessive, concentration on eccentrically refined qualities. In two leaves, for example, one representing a peony and the other a butterfly perching on a flower, delicately drawn lines spread out from the base of each flower petal and disappear at it's outer edge. These lines then continue on, but in different directions, on other petals. Within the form of each flower the delicate, refined, systematic lines flow in each assigned area. The textural movement of each area is associated with that of the neighboring areas, constituting a flat major pattern with decorative sub-patterns and building up a well adorned substantiality, a finished work, in empty space.