This small painting (in progress) is from a photo I took of a hiking trail on the north side of Guatay Mountain on a hike I took with Dusty (my dog) this past spring. The painting is 8 x 10 and I'm attempting to paint it all in one sitting. We'll see! Good practice for actually going outside and painting plein air someday!

Landscape, Tax Deduction, Learning Experience

Finished and framed -- three small cattle in the distance

Version 3 - dealing with the glaze that didn't work; better sky

Version 1 - First colors

Version 2 - being brave with sky

November 19 -- I donated this painting to the Descanso Townhall for its raffle to raise money for a new roof, so the piece ended up as a tax deduction! I'm very happy I saved all the versions and this story. It was a fun experience and I learned so much from it, most of all that I'm not a glaze person. I guess I think if you want to paint glazes paint water colors. But I never painted the tree and I never painted the cattle, though on the final paint

It was also the target of a scam on Etsy! It provided that experience as well.

I've wanted to paint this for ever -- well, since three years ago when I noticed beautiful, vivid yellow flowers blooming beneath a very large and interesting tree in Descanso Valley (the valley where I live). The cows love to hang out under the tree on a hot day, but they also seem to love these flowers because when they're blooming, the cattle are always there. Since they bloom in May, it's heifers and calves I see standing around the tree in the late afternoon light. Oil on canvas, 18 x 24

This is the first layer of paint -- I'm probably going to just let this painting carry me along. I had an idea of what it would be, but it seems to have its own sense of its own destiny!

More work -- not necessarily for the better -- we'll see. A glaze I tried does not make me happy and will probably go.

The Cows Come Home

Cow and Calf, 8x10, oil on canvas

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Clumping Together in the Rain, 9x12, Oil on canvas

Favorite Words from Literature

One project in which I'm very interested -- and find a lot of fun -- is rendering some of my favorite passages from literature into visual art. 

Rilke, Duino Elegies, "Fourth Elegy"

"Who shows a child just as he really is? Who places him
within his constellation, with the measuring-rod
of distance in his hand. Who makes his death
from gray bread that grows hard,-or leaves
it there inside his rounded mouth, jagged as the core
of a sweet apple?
The minds of murderers
are easily comprehended. But this: to contain death,
the whole of death, even before life has begun,
to hold it all so gently within oneself,
and not be angry: that is indescribable."

I got this idea from an apple box that came holding four, perfect, honey-crisp apples. I bought them at Trader Joes, and they were beautiful, but as happens, they were not as beautiful as they looked. They quickly rotted and I was able only to eat one. Within a day or two of buying them I had to throw them into the compost.

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Candide by Voltaire

"There is a concatenation of all events in the best of possible worlds; for, in short, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for the love of Miss Cunegund; had you not been put into the Inquisition; had you not traveled over America on foot; had you not run the Baron through the body; and had you not lost all your sheep, which you brought from the good country of El Dorado you would not have been here to eat preserved citrons and pistachio nuts," said Dr. Pangloss

"Excellently observed, but let us now cultivate our garden."

For this, my thought, the joke, is that Candide and his friends were all happy at the end, not because they'd given up searching for the ineffable perfect love, life, lesson, world, wealth, but because all along they'd been garden gnomes.