The Consideration of Calligraphy as Sculpture

My darling partner Betty's, niece, Mira, explained to me a little about oriental calligraphy and of course I can't remember all the details but the conversation affirmed that their is an entire culture and a large part of the world that has the wonderful ability to think of the written language as a visual language of pictures or ideograms, fascinating. what an intrinsically artistic culture that must be as compared to our lineal alphabet inherited from the easterly direction of Sumera.
I've often signed things with my name followed by a quick cartoon of a horse head. I ramped that up to an ideogram to look like the above illustration. Now I have it in mind to explore what that would look like in a 3 demensional piece of sculpture. probably welded metal.
After taking a workshop from master brush builder Glenn Grishkoff, I made myself some brushes using bamboo handles and various brush materials. These images were created with ringtail cat hair.
I find contemplating brushwork to expand upon the western process of picture making. "Seeing" is one thing but implementing the "Zen" of the brush stroke is another consideration entirely. I find on 'youtube' demonstrations of chinese landscape painting that reflects the inherent consideration of the brushstroke as well as definition of a landscape done with black ink filters the effort of landscape painting down to its essentials. To combine the two i.e. occidental and oriental landscape techniques is a challenging aspiration.

Chicken Roost

What a great place for chickens. They can get out of the rain, the warm sun shines through the broken window like a green house, the rooster can keep an eye on his harem and the hens can keep an eye on their chicks playing in the shade of the old truck. what a life...........

Poultry Paintings ( :

Both SOLD thanks for your support!


Poultry Paintings or Chicken Scratchings, WhatEverrrrr.........my manager found out I like chickens and suggested I do a "chicken painting" a day and start a "product line". I took her advice and everyday I whip out a painting of a chicken. It's fun. It only takes a couple hours at the most to do an 8x10. I used to do small watercolors of chickens, mat them and sell them for $15 or so apiece. They disappeared like hotcakes.

They are so colorful and a great excuse to have fun with paint. They are very sociable. Watching chickens is like a world in microscope plus the added benefit of eggs for the table. My favorites are banties and Araucaunas. They lay blue and green eggs.

I think everyone can relate to chickens and some even identify with the little buggers. I remember before my youngest son, JC, began to talk he raised a chick and carried it around for a pet. Maybe that's why he crows like a rooster now that he's in college ( :

Back in the saddle with my brush.

It has been a real effort to get back to painting after visiting Maine. Seems I got more painting done on my days off at the Wildwood Stables, driving horses, than I do when I am home. Too many distractions. Remodeling the house, hauling hay, getting the winter wood in and just the daily distractions. My manager/partner has been great about arranging life so I can get back to the easle. I was worried I might fall out of the 'groove'. I have to an extent. I missed the grand colors of fall, of being among the cottonwoods, painting their reflections in the river. I had plans to carry on some ideas I had developed from previous paintings that required big canvases, I even got the canvas but haven't got back in that groove which is disappointing.

To get beyond that I just go outside and find a spot and lose myself in the moment. Sometimes I catch one, like these here. These old trucks are parked out in a field, kind of an old bone yard, typical of abandoned vehicles you find on the rez. I think that is because folks use their vehicles until they just can't go anymore and put them in the back forty for parts. It used to be horses now it is cars and trucks.

If the sun isn't out or it's too cold, I work in the dungeon/studio where I get lost in technique. I'm trying to work from photographs. I don't know why as photos aren't what it's all about. For me, landscape painting is about being there, about the Place and about the Moment. I get distracted by Technique when I have all the time in the world to screw up a painting but it is consistent with a thought I have about the painting as an "artifact", that needs to exist on its own elements. Less about the effort as an attempt to make a statement or impart an observation but to explore technique and the realm of the abstract. I have to admit that it is easy for me to ramp up my painting into realms of the abstract. So far I keep myself grounded by a reference to something figurative but I suspect if I have any response that supports my 'other' work it would be easy for me to pursue that direction. I like color and I like big canvas and I like to paint.

The above painting 16x20, oil is a copy of a plein air painting that came off well. Rather than try to tweak the original I did a copy using the visual vocabulary from the original plein air painting that I had acquired during the 3 hr painting session, and photographs of the site. What I found is that I couldn't replicate the success of the plein air painting and ended up with a new landscape. OK fine. So then I proceeded to the painting below. Using both photos and the previous efforts and got caught up in technique. If plein air is acquiring a visual vocabulary then using that vocabulary to express more than the mundane might be where I am heading.

The 'painting as an artifact',

came to me while looking at paintings in museums which are in effect paintings that have been put aside and archived, which makes them an article of interest because of the singularity which they represent. Whether it is a new fossil or new painting the article has enough significance that it is archivable. Somehow I also view paintings like tombstones which are the artifacts we use to consecrate a persons life, memorialize it, memorialize that moment in time, even if that time spans an entire persons life. Portrait of a moment.

Artist Reception Friday Oct, 26, 4-7pm Arbor Crest, Riverpark Square, Spokane

I'll be having a reception at the Arbor Crest Wine Cellars in Riverpark Square, between 4 and 7 pm, Friday October 26 in Spokane.

We will be raffeling one of my paintings so come on down and test your luck.

I've got some great landscapes of all sizes. The Seasons Series won Best of Show at the Museum at Moses Lake. It's a great piece which includes 4, 3'x4' oils on separate canvas joined to be one single piece.

Come on down and have a sip of wine and visit. Love to see you there.

Granite Sculpture and Steve Hayne's Granite Museum

Picture of Steve Haynes, stonemason on Mt. Desert Isle and curator of the Granite Museum.

Steve is working on a memorial. He was asked to match the granite of the existing cemetary plot. He is so knowledgeable that he can not only decipher the type of granite but what quarry in New England it came from. He obtained a piece from the correct quarry and is working in up with an antique machine that he rebuilt. The machine is air driven but manually worked to bush down the surface of the granite. This work had previously been done by hand. This "machine" replaced the 20 men required to do such labor. Mt. Desert Isle was reknowned for the granite and stone masons there were here. Many large projects in New York and Washington D.C. as well as other famous cities have buildings made from quarries in this area. Steve has accumulated a wealth of information, tools and geneaologies of the men that worked the stone.

After seeing the wonderful granite sculptures created this summer on the Schoodic Penninsula, I went looking for someone to show me how to work stone and have found a real granite guru in Steve Haynes. I hope to get back next year and look over his shoulder to learn more of this lost art.

Communities in the area collected $5000 in matching funds to have the priveledge of having one of these seven sculptures in their communities. The building in the background was constructed for the Navy as an officers' quarters by J.D. Rockefeller Jr. The bottom picture is a sculpture called Rebirth.

Otter Cliffs and Bernard Harbor.

"Otter Cliffs" 8x10 oil
Pleinair painting at Otter Cliffs is an experience of a life time. This little study shows Sand Beach and Mt. Champlain in the background where Hudson River School painters Thomas Cole and Fredrich Church painted in the 1840's. What is so wonderful is the location.
I try to get to this sight as the sun rises above the atlantic and lights the granite cliffs with an orange glow.
Lobster boats work their traps at my feet. I can see right into the cabin and watch them pull the traps up with the winch, toss the reject lobsters back into the ocean and the keepers into the lobster box.
The ocean is calm this time of year and the constant wash of the waves against the cliffs is soothing and mesmerizing. The occasional cruise ship comes in like an alien space ship and I am grateful as it rounds the bend out of sight but I think about the guys back at the stables and they busy day they and the horses will have hauling people around Day Mt.
Those thoughts change as a beautiful sail boat comes into view. I watch the cormorants dive for fish and study them as they dry their feathers in the sun. Evidently they can't allow their feathers to stay wet as they don't have the oils ducks have to keep them afloat. They do swim like ducks but have to return to the rocks to dry off. They look like prehistoric creatures with their bony wings and long petrodactyl like beaks pointed to the sky.

"Bernard Harbor" 8x10 oil
This is a quick sketch done while the sun was just setting. It took about 30 minutes while painting with fellow artist Hugh Grant that has a summer home here in Bernard Harbor. It is a real working lobsterman's town with many lobster boats filling the harbor as well as the reknown Thurston Lobster Pound that offers lobster right from the boats.
The maples are beginning to change color. I'm excited to have the opportunity to paint the fall colors.

Driving horses, painting and new friends at Acadia

Here I am driving Wildwood's Barney and Charlie to the top of 580' Day Mt. We head to the top of Day Mt., to catch the sunset. The view is fabulous looking out over Seal Harbor and the Cranberry Islands. Day Mt is only 580' above sea level but it is so close to the coast that it is like being on a 50 story building. We see whales off the coast and beautiful sail boats.

Bernard Harbor, ME

I did a painting of the Bernard Harbor Lobster Pound. I got permission from 85 year old Irving Silverton to paint from his lobster dock. Irving has a Light House chapel that he marries couples in memory of his departed wife. He always wanted to be a lobsterman but ended up marrying people instead.

Lobster boats unload lobster here and you can buy them right off the dock or go to the famous Thurmond Lobster restaurant and have them cooked with an ear of corn. There was a long line so I went across to Bass Harbor and traded a watercolor for dinner at the Mainly Maine Lobster shack.I keep forgetting to take pictures of all the paintings I've done and some have been sold or traded. I've got to watch that and try to get them recorded.

I thought we were busy driving carriages before but now it's Cruise ship season and we will get waves of riders.

I've met lots of great people, the weather has been choice. I'm coming to terms with maritime landscapes enough that folks are buying them. The hardwoods are starting to turn. In a few weeks I should be painting waves of color.

I met another pleinair artist Grant Hughes and plan to go out painting with him.

I missed our Ferry County Fair for the first time in 20 something years and feel pretty down about that but I went to the Blue Hill Fair here in Maine to see one of our teamsters compete. I saw some of the biggest horses and oxen I've ever seen. A couple Belgians weighed over 2700 lbs. and some oxen were as big as draft horses. Unfortunately I didn't get to see the oxen work and would have liked to have seen the National field dog trials.

eclipse of the moon over Seal Harbor, ME

Update, I've been driving horses from dawn to dusk, picking poop from paddocks and roads. Painting on my days off and eating lobster when the opportunity arrises which is quite often. I've traded paintings for lobster many times because I'm usually painting down at the docks where the lobstermen work and they like paintings of their boats. Sold a painting today at Penny Chau's and altogether am having a great time of it all. I've been invited back next year and look forward to becoming part of the Wildwood family and explore more of Maine.

more from Mt Desert Isle and Wildwood Stables

It's a pretty intense time driving horses on Mt. Desert Isle. There are 6 teamsters 12 teams and 8 wagons.

We're out in the paddocks by 5a.m. and bring the horses in to feed them oats. Then we go clean the manure out of the paddocks and then we get to go eat our breakfast and start our day.

Here's a shot of the crew. left to right. Charly from Mississippi (Postal Man), Neal from Tennessee (you can just see his bald head, Randy Money (Mr. Manager a.k.a. coach, cool dude, always laughing, the more serious the situation the more he laughs), Oolah (Danish road apple mechanic), Janey (coaches wife and all around girl friday, vet, emt, cook and office manager), Mrs Bobbi Winterberg, (gracious southern Bell), Les Peters ( expatriat east african who played rock and roll in Rome with 10 yrs after, hendrix and a bunch of other legends, now hunting guide for LL Bean), and Jim Davis (local horse pull champion and all around draft horse expert). Most of these guys have been together for 20 years putting this shindig together. The stories of the past are outrageous. I hope to get some down in print, like the guy who impressed girls by roasting marshmellows between his fingers and bending horse shoe nails into rings for his girlfriends.

I thought I might acquire a down east Maine accent but all these folk are southerners, Yawl!

Plein Air Painting in Acadia

Every chance I get I go painting. It's kind of like fishing. Sometimes I catch a good one and other times I have to throw it back (paint over it).

The colors on the coast of Maine are different than the Pacific NW. More subdued, weathered. The mountains are worn and rounded. Because of feldspar, Pink suffuses the granite, making the sand beaches a warm color, vermillion mixed with yellow ochre. The skies are horizon to horizon without any great mountain range for the sun to hide behind. Pink clouds in a Cerulean sky over a steel grey ocean. Long lines of horizon, islands and headlands.

The lack of wildlife is curious. I've seen only whitetail deer, heard an owl and see the scat of raccoons. Why there are no birds, not even a sparrow is beyond me. Of course there are ravens and seagulls, some terns and I've seen a turkey vulture but as much as I am outside there is a perplexing lack of wildlife.

I'm coming to terms with maritime scenery. I visited galleries in Nw Harbor and was enormously impressed with the quality and quantity of work. What seems to be the significant difference between the NW and here on the east coast of Maine is both the amount of artists there are working here and the sufistication of the patronage. Of course this is the domain of 'old east coast money', so it would go to follow that the market would develop accordingly.

I was greatly inspired by an artist named Farandon who lived from 1880's to 1964. He painted the coast of Maine. His style is representational in the vein of Edward Hopper but less urbane. He blocks in areas of color letting the underpainting become lines, less expressive brushwork, empasizing composition. I'm developing my spectrum of values better, creating new darks mixing french ultramarine blue with umber mixed and either alizarin for warm darks or hooker's green for cooler darks. I have achieved some progress with the temperature of colors which means I think I have resolved values sufficiently although it is always a struggle to coordinate them into a cohesive composition, something that is difficult to pull off in the short time one has, plein air painting.

Plein air painting is a performance. It is like a jazz player's spontaneous interpretation of the moment when a familiar tune is improvised but is recorded and becomes an artifact of time. I am reluctant to develop my plein air efforts because I feel they need to be a record of that moment. It is difficult to not modify that moment. I think it removes the plein air authenticity and changes the painting into a 'studio' piece. The challenge is to focus on the moment yet visualize a finished product executed in such a fashion to not only memorialize the moment but for the effort to look finished and complete, like a haiku or a chinese character that has meaning yet is a visual symbol of substance. It is difficult to leave the piece alone and frustrating to not 'get it right' in one sitting.

I have a couple pieces in a local gallery in Seal Harbor and hope to have more. It is good to have my work accepted and on display.

Daily Grind but fun!

As I was saying befor I was so rudely interrupted by the rain, we get up early, feed the horses, pick the poop up in the paddocks, wash the horses, wash their shoulders with alcohol to make sure they are clean and not sore, go eat our breakfast, harness for the first run at 9 and don't end until 8 or 9 at night when we have dinner. It makes for a long day.I've been driving Rex and Cracker. Rex is pretty high strung but is doing OK since I put a buck strap on him to even him up with Cracker and now Cracker has to work instead of letting Rex do all the work which makes Cracker kind of grumpy. I also drove a team of blacks, Tom and Jerry. They were incredibly slow and you had to stay on them to get them around the mountain in time for the next load. There are a number of routes but mine has been 3 trips around Day mountain per day and a sunset trip that goes to the top of the mountain as well as around the mountain which is a 4 mile trip. We all drive to the top of the mountain for the sunset trip because it is so popular. Altogether 6 teamsters make around 20 trips total.

We have 10 teams so none of the horses has to work all day. We rotate horses to keep them in shape and rest any horse that looks like it needs to rest.Some of the guys have brought their own teams but most of the horses are company horses. They work from May to October. Jim brings 3 of his own horses to keep them in shape for the pulling matches. He's a serious puller and does well. Tehre are alot of pulling contests in Maine so he's gone every weekend to play at the fairs. They are pretty serious about pulling around here and pay as much as $50,000 for a single pulling horse. All glory too! No purse at all!

Seal Harbor, ME

Just down from the Wildwood stables is everything I need in the little community of Seal Harbor. Gallery, restaurant and all kinds of things to paint from boats to ocean, to islands in the sunset.

The town is really small but the best part is tourist pass it by. It's got a post office, gas station and a fine restaurant all lined up right next to each other. I introduced myself to the owner of the Centerpiece Gallery and Antiques, Penny Chau. She's a long time resident and has known the folks at the stables for quite a time. I left a couple paintings with her and hope to get a couple more before the season is over. I paint every chance I get and have done 10 or so plein air pieces and quite a few water colors. I'm getting used to the colors as well as painting boats and the ocean. The light seems to be softer, more diffuse. Not as much as Wisconsin where the humidity was so high but still a lot of moisture in the air. Sunrise and sunset seem to last a long time as the sun comes up over the ocean and this is the first place in the U.S. to get morning sun. Without any Cascade curtain or Rockies, the sunset is spectacular.

The work is pretty steady. We get up at 5 a.m. and bring the teams to the stables to get their morning oats. They get about 35 lbs of feed a day. Ooops its raining and I'm sittin outside so I'll sign off.

Wildwood Stables and Mr. Rockefeller's Roads

We finally made it to Wildwood stables after 4100 miles from Keller, WA. It's a great setup with 6 Acadia Sociables, acouple of 20 passenger trolleys and 10 teams to go around. They put me to work as soon as I got here. I did the obligatory ride with each of the teamsters to hear their speal and the next day was handed the lines of a team and off I went with a load of carriage riders, pointing out the highlights of the ride and a general line of BS that would have given a farmer with hip waders fits. It's been five days of 16 hours a day of driving horses, feeding horses and shoveling road apples and I love it. The guys are great and the boss is a prince.

It's all about Rockefeller's Roads. I load up a gaggle of tourists and begin my spiel. "Hi, I'm Gregg and I came 4100 miles for the priveledge of driving horses on Mr. Rockefeller's Roads and I want to welcome you to my time machine as we take a trip back in time to a simpler and perhaps gentler time when life went at the break neck speed of 3 miles an hour. The speed a horse walks. We're going to have the opportunity to see how roads were built by muscle power and how ingeneous our great grandad had to be to forge a way through the wilderness." I say as I cluck to the team to step up and off we go hauling anywhere from 12 to 22 passengers on an Acadia Sociable or Trolley for an 1 hour, 2 hour or, if you're really into it, a charter tour of wherever you want to go on the 57 miles of hand built roads John D. Rockefeller built in 1914, so he could drive horse in the wilderness he loved so much. Quite a hobby for a guy whose papa started Standard Oil, now Exxon Mobil. Some kind of justice in that I'd say.

I'll be sharing more of the trip but for now I best hit the hay as the day starts at 4:30 a.m. and doesn't end untill the last horse is put to bed at 9 or 10 at night. TALLY HO!

Door County to Onieda, American Tourism at its finest

"See the USA from your Chevrolet". Remember that tune? That's us. We're so quick we only point at the sites as they roll by. "See Lena, der it is. Get back in da car." Actually, we did stop at Niagra Falls enough for me to do a watercolor sketch and take a gazillion pictures. Niagra has been a tourist carnival since the first Jesuit priest fell on his knees an shouted "Hallelua", "I can see the honeymoon capital of the world." Boy was he right. Like 'Old Faithfull' a case of loving something to death.

There used to be eagles nesting, osprey fishing and bear snagging fish but all that is gone. Lunar Island, situated in the falls, used to have a 'moonbow' but it went away due to the urban lights. Bolts have been drilled into the face of the falls to hold the soft limestone from eroding, otherwise the falls would move upriver as it has over the millenia. Talk about moving real estate. The Hilton at Niagra and all the other honeymoon suites would be out of business.

Curiously, there is a lot of electrictiy produced here. They can make a million megawatts of power but they only do so at night to allow some/half, of the water to spill over the falls during the day for the tourists. What with all the demand for power and brownouts here in the east, I can feature where there may be a time in the future when they won't be able to afford the luxury of spilling water for tourists.

We passed miles and miles of coal plants along the Great Lakes. Coal for steel and coal for electricity. Pretty dirty. Funky too. Makes me wonder how the fishery is holding up. We met a couple fishermen that went out almost daily and caught their limit of Brown trout and Salmon. That was impressive. 5 to 25 lb'ers! So it must be OK?

One of the things that has impressed Betts and I is the amount of rural America. We think of the east as an urban landscape but that is hardly so as there are miles and miles of farms tucked away in the country. I was going to say hills but I have yet to see one for the last 2000 miles. The highest thing around are the bridges. As an ex-Ironworker I have been impressed with some of the bridges we've crossed coming through the Great Lakes. Hundreds of feet in the air and miles long they are impressive. But Gawd! this is flat country. We're definitely westerners. We've got mts., and valleys, rivers and canyons in our blood. I'm glad to have traveled the flat lands so I can appreciate the west better.

This quick sketch shows 'Horseshoe Falls' from the U.S side looking at the many storied hotels of Niagra Falls, C.A. Water from Lake Erie, dashes down cataracts falling 187' over the falls. Horseshoe Falls is 2200' wide. Altogether, Horseshoe, Bridal Veil and American Falls is almost a mile wide. A great mist from the falls drenches everything for miles including the tourists.

Door County Dairy Farms

Oh well, didn't get into the Penninsula Art School show this year. I'll try again next year. Can't imagine a better way than to paint my way across America. This trip will pave the way and I'll know where the spots I want to paint are. Maybe take a little extra time upfront so I can get more painting done. Get back to Door County and paint some of the farms before they disappear to developers.

After the reception at PAS. Betts and I went out to Bleys Tavern and got to know the locals. Met Tony Palezsh (don't think I got that right). Tony was born and raised here on one of the dairy farms. He operates an excavation business. I learned all about installing septic systems. Great stuff, sounds like they have as many or more regulations here as we do out west. Curious thing out here is that the Penninsula has very little topsoil and alot of sand stone base rock so quite a few septic systems have to be 'heap leach' systems.

The tavern was something out of a Walt Whitman poem, one room, pool table and juke box at the crossroads, with a baseball field in a corn patch stretching to the horizon. Could have been right out of the movie, Field of Dreams. Folks still suck cigarettes inside the tavern. Wonder how long that will hold out. Washington passed a law you can't smoke in public buildings or private establishments and smokers can't be nearer than 25' from the entrance of a building.

Drinks were incredibly cheap. 1$ beer on tap and $3 shots. Been a long time since I had a Pabst Blue Ribbon. Needless to say, Tony and I got to talking about personal stuff. He was an orphan raised by a Penninsula farm family. "Got to tinkin' dat I might just well write da Catlic sisters down Green Bay, ta see if de ol dame would have me. Turns out I went from da youngest to the oldest of de fambly." says Tony drawing off a filtered camel. Now he's got brothers and sisters. "Days plumbers too. Must be in de blood. Go figure." Bout that time, pool cues start clattering on the floor and the big Swede bartender, about 289 lbs of nice guy yells cross the counter, "Don't mind ye hevin some good time but ye better keep dem sticks at attention ya yayhoos." He's got a T shirt says he's a volunteer fireman. We share with him that the fire alarm went off the other night in our room and he says, " O det right, heard about dat, must have been over to Hanks place. I just rolled over when I got the call and went back to sleep. Figured it was jest one of dem dam new alarms. Dey go off from the humidity all the time. " I could tell he was a bit perturbed by these faulty systems. Gotta say though, I'd welcome a volunteer outfit like his what with the big shoulders and his friendly red cheeked mug he could pack a whole family out of a burning building, no problem.t

It was about sundown and the full moon was coming up across the corn fields. Took about 100 pictures with my digital picture machine. Drove around taking snaps of some of the best looking farms I've ever seen. Land O' Lakes farms. Serious milkers. Tidy as a pin. I'm impressed with the crops they grow on this thin soil. Gotta be some hardy souls. Dairy is about the hardest most dedicated work on the planet and these folks have been doing it for generations. Hope they can hold out. What with the developers paying big bucks for the land and most farms gobbled up by corporate interests I imagine the lifestyle is in jepordy like so many other natural resourced based lifestyles. Tony has a nephew that's going organic, hoping that nich market can keep the lifestyle going.

Penninsula Art School Paintout, Fish Cr., WI

The Penninsula Art School Paintout was a great success. Over $60,000 of pleinair paintings were sold at the Gala Reception. 36 artists spent the week painting in and around Fish Creek, WI which is a resort location of the tip of WI above Green Bay on Lake Michigan. This picture shows the auction of the featured artists that did the quick draw. Everyone was alloted 2 hrs to do a painting in the area. The public enjoyed watching and asking questions as the artists worked. The paintings were then auctioned. I believe an average of $800 per painting was made and atleast 15 paintings were sold. All together the PAS did well. I congratulate the volunteers that did a fine job putting on a stellar show for the artists and public.


I didn't get into the "Featured Artists" show but will try to jury in next year. I may get in this year if the quick draw painting I did, merits an award. The jury will decide who, from those that participated in the quick draw will warrant an invitation into the show next year. I've got my fingers crossed but I'm not too happy with the painting I did. Oh well, I gave it a shot and will try to jury in next year.
I did this painting yesterday. I also met the owners Dennis and Mary Bley. They had just purchased a Belgian mare and Dennis was seeing how she went. I noticed them working and stopped to visit and had a long talk about horses, horse logging and farming. Like most places logging and farming is disappearing in this area as it gets developed by tourism. Since S. Dakota It has been intriguing to compare the farms back east to those back home. Not very many

farmers out west do silage whereas out east everyone does it hence the fields and fields of corn and soybeans.
Many of the artists complain of all the green but I have been finding the colors delightful. Everything seems to be suffused with Cerulean .

The adventure to Maine continues.........

Time out for pictures of the grandkids. This little impadoodle is my grandson. Must be Kaiden but I can't really tell as the twins are identical to me. Couple of real Jokers. As you can see they're well taken care of. The adventure continues. We got to the Pennensula in N. Wisconsin and checked into our adobe only to wake up at 2a.m. to the annoying sound of a fire alarm in our room. Long story short, the humidity set of the fire alarm. Good way to meet the locals even if it is the local fire department.

Museum Adventures

My first opportunity on the trip was to stop at the Wild Bill Cody Museum to see a mural by John Clymer. Never did find the Clymer but enjoyed the collection of western art. I was especially glad to find Remington's plein air work, studies done on location in the west, far better than the studio work he did. The Plein air work of an artist is an opportunity to see the artist at work. How he interpreted the moment. The skill with which he applied the knowledge of technique he has, bereft of message ,yet containing the essence of the artist's character.


Stopping in Waterton, SD, to see my grandkids, I discovered the local art hero, Terry Redlin. WOW! Gotta be impressed with the level of commercial success an artist can have. A temple to Redlin's art, there is the Redlin Art Center, a 30,000 sq' marble mansion housing Redlin's paintings and prints, as well everything imaginable you can print his work on, from shower curtains to coffe mugs. It is easy for me to dislike the work of Terry Redlin. It suffers from what I call the 'log cabin syndrome', where an artist finds success at a particular thing, then never moves beyond that success. I do appreciate what he does say, in-as-much-as he opened my eyes to the horizontal light of the prairie. His drawings are exceptional, again, raw, spontaneous studies of the world around him in which his eye, technique and personality shine through.

Part of what has been so fun about this trip is discovering the art that lies hidden in the bowels of america. I had no idea what was to be found in Minneapolis, MN. Google found the Minneapolis Art Institute for me and an exhibit of Nordic work from 1700 to 1900. What else would you expect from the land of the Lutherens? Sponsor? Sons of Norway! Go figure! An exceptional show taking me from the classic style of Romantics in the vein of Bierstadt, heavy glazes and detailed brushwork to that of Edvard Muench, a.k.a. 'The Scream'. Here is a sample of an exceptional masterwork, probably 5'x8', by Carl Larson, may be the most reknown of the Scandanavian artists. Evidently this big painting was done outside on location. As you can see, you have to be one dedicated S.O.B. to paint in the land of the North. If you look closely he is wearing a pair of shaggy boots that would make a pair of Sorrel's look lightweight. This painting was shown at the Paris Salon. I'll bet is was the only snow scene in the show.
One of the things I have come to understand is my attachment to Realism. I have come to learn that Realism is a very relative term. Artists are shackled to the muse and that muse is nature, from which we derive our knowledge, whether that knowledge leads us down the path of abstraction or a literal interpretation of what we see. What is important is to be engaged and devoted to the process. To be the filter by which nature flows through the brush to the canvas, work that becomes frozen in time to be discovered by future aspirants. It reminds me quite a bit of the fossil footprints I saw in the desert of the Badlands or Borlund's Mt. Rushmore. That effort sure should be around for a while!

Wildlife of Wyoming

Sanpoil to South Dakota, painting my way to Maine

We discovered our first camp was a teepee on Rock Creek just west of Missoula, Mt. A pleasant way to start our adventure of painting my way across America.
Although it looks rough, we had a wonderful meal at the Stagecoach Inn that has been serving travelers four generations. We brought our own Cabernet from Sandpoint Winery that went well with both my Prime Rib and Bett's Dumpling Stew.

Saturday morning took us east to Yellowstone NP. I look forward to viewing sights painted by Bierstadt and Moran that I have always admired. I'm standing in front of Yellowstone Falls as seen from Inspiration Point. Unfortunately Moran painted from Artist's Point which was closed at the time due to construction. I could see the spot directily across the canyon from here. I have to say that his painting hanging in the National Gallery was an honest and true rendering of this marvelous landscape. I'm not sure of the exact demensions of his painting but it is grand, atleast 10'x 16' perhaps bigger. He did many watercolors of this sight that captured the extraordinairily complex colors that make up the canyon walls. His effort helped convince congress to make Yellowstone into one of the first National Parks.

Alfred Bierstadt of the Hudson River School, c. 1850, also painted in Yellowstone. Bierstadt also ventured out west to return to New York where he sold tickets to view his huge landscapes as if they were movie matinees. Although photography was in its infancy, artists such as these, using the skill of their hands and the magic of their imagination made a legend of the phenomenal beauty of our world, so much so, we have set such landscapes aside for future generations to appreciate. The artist makes the ordinary, extra ordinary and makes the extrordinary, timeless.


In such a fashion have Americans come to inheret such timelessness by the hand of Guston Borglund who dovoted his life to the sculpting of Mt. Rushmore. It is interesting to compare the efforts of those that have recorded nature as Moran and Bierstadt have done, to the altering of the landscape to memorialize man's place in time. Moran and Bierstadt memorialized nature using Art, Borglund memorialized Art by using Nature.















I captured the Absaroka's at sunrise from the east side of Yellowstone. 8"x24" oil







A sketch of Lamar River and Elk Mt in Yellowstone. 6"x18" oil