Last Look and Yellow Trees

Last Look at the Big Hole

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Since I'm home, it feels right to send out a couple paintings in each of the remaining newsletters, so we can get to the choosing more quickly. I thought about posting all the rest of the paintings in this newsletter, since they're already up on the Jacobson Arts website, but there are things to say about each of them, and so I am going to string this along for a little big longer.

These final few paintings are probably the most emotional of the trip. I was feeling tired and lonely and so far from home - but I was exhilarated by what I was seeing and what I was painting, and as always with these paintings trips, I didn't want the journey to end.  All of that shows up in these pieces, I think. It shows in the brilliant colors that pulled so strongly on my heart. It shows in the wide, free splashes of paint I put on the canvas, and how I loved the silky feel of those mixed colors, those random melanges. It shows in the details I decided to allow and the many more that I decided to let pass. This trip brought me to a place of ease, excitement and freedom in my painting that I'd never experienced, and it shows in all the paintings, but especially, I believe, in these final ones. 

And I'd be leaving out part of the story if I didn't mention how very scared I was, with each piece, that the thing I found I could do - and which I did do - would suddenly be gone. 

Yellow Trees

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These yellow trees, whatever they were, cottonwoods or tamaracks or aspens, they were the visual extravagance of this trip. They were the glitter, the glitz, the sparkle of this autumn landscape, and I fell in love with them. This particular grove was in Divide, on the way to Wisdom. I saw it on the trip in, and had to go back and find it on the trip out. It was so very windy, however, that I had to paint inside the van. I'm going to make a large version of this painting very soon, before the memory of the shine and flash of these trees fades.

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Scenes from the Road 

Saw this marvelous painting, above, in a store in Wachapreague. Below, the sign on the door of the gas station: "Open til Closed / 8 or 9 to 5 or 6 / Closed when door locked." 

p.s., the gas station is for sale... 

Just a pretty scene near Divide, east of Wisdom. 

Above, the Crossing, the only restaurant in town. Below is Shale, my wait person, who just earned her master's degree in Emergency Management and Disaster Resiliance at Tulane in New Orleans. She'd come back to Wisdom because her grandparents have a ranch just outside of town, and she'd spent nearly every summer of her life there, so it seemed like a good place to gather herself together and figure out where to look for work and start on her career.  

A nice sculpture outside the gallery in Wisdom. 

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Dog of the Day

It's Tanner, a sweet little dog who lives with a couple in Omaha who collect my art, and sponsored me on this trip. Next time, you'll meet Tiny, Tanner's doggie housemate.