Background

As I said on my painting home page, I paint what I feel about our planet.

All my life I've been deeply attached to the land that's been in my family since 1867. There is much less of it in the family now due to the vicissitudes of "progress", the economy, and Vermont taxes, but I still live on a shrinking patch of it.

I grew up as a reader, of course cutting my environmental teeth on Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. My two favorite science courses in university were Astronomy and Meteorology, both have led to a lifelong interest in their respective disciplines. I camped one June in the mid-sixties in White Wolf Campground at Yosemite, when ours was the only occupied site, and later saw a cover of Life Magazine showing wall to wall cars in the park. Then I caught the snippet of news about the Cuyahoga, once again, being ignited. Around the same time I think, there was a story about Lake Erie, then the most polluted of the Great Lakes, saying that it would take five million dollars to clean it up. It seemed a small sum to me for such a deed, but no one stepped up.

The published research on the oceans that occurred during the International Geophysical Year (1957), made me acutely aware of our planet's seas and their endangered future. And then of course began to regularly appear concerns about the ozone layer, and now the shrinking population of songbirds, of bees, the deformation of frogs, the millions of tons of plastic in the sea, the melting in the polar regions. As Linda Ellerbee's tagline has it—"And, so it goes."

And so it came . . .

All of this information, concern, and downright worry, just piled up, slowly over all the years. But, it just sat there, filed away in one of the unopened cabinets of my brain.

And, then, something happened. A number of things occurred around the same time and must have finally reached a critical mass.

• selected as an Art of Action finalist in 2008
• which introduced me to some other artists
• who aroused a dormant interest in color
• which led me to read Philip Ball's Bright Earth
• which led me to an obsession with color
• which led to an obsession with Vermilion

This all occurred over a span of about four months. And, finally, almost without making any decision, I unboxed the watercolors I'd been buying (for absolutely no reason) over the years and began adding to them. Then every time I could afford it, I bought a brush, or another color. Finally, in April of this year I actually began to paint. My attraction to watercolor was fed by my love of the watercolors of the 19th Century British travellers who recorded what they saw in quick, lively sketches.

Quickly I moved from attempting more or less realistic watercolors, to what you see here in Gallery I. I would wake up in the morning and one of these images would be in my head. Or something would click over, like the Cuyahoga memory, and I would carry it around for days until it transformed itself from that intellectual memory to a visual image.

Of late (2010) I've been moving back to watercolor, but directed at trying to capture the Vermont essence, which for me seems to be hills and sky.

Framing

It was with great pleasure that I came upon the idea of framing these with recycled wooden frames from garage sales. Not only could I afford the $.25 and $.50 they usually cost, but given my subject matter, using them to frame the work was much more fitting than buying new frames. (In my other visual life as a black and white photographer of Vermont scenes, I have run into the hard cost of framing, and so, find it difficult and often impossible to bring my images to life in prints and frames!)

Again, if you are interested in this sort of art, please do sign my Guestbook; it's non-intrusive, private, and cared for.

Other Vermont Artists

I've been helped, encouraged, or just plain inspired by several Vermont artists. I call attention to the following artists—each for separate reasons.

Susan Abbott, for her magnificent use of color, and generous willingness to take a fledgling seriously and share her knowledge.

Meta Strick, for her incredible sketchbooks, prolific talent, and strong encouragement.

Karen Day-Vath, a quiet, serious artist working in St. Albans, who should spend more time painting than she does. It was her nest of acrylics that I dove into one day, and the next spent all the money I could on buying some!

Jayne Shoup, who, out of the Internet blue, pointed me to an incredible artist I'd never heard of (though I should have)—Arthur Dove. She did this in a comment on one of my blog posts where I had posted many of the images now on this site. That was a real gift, because now, on the days I think I'm nuts, I look at his work, and, think, "Well, if I am, I don't care!" Her pastels also knocked me for a loop and gave a whole new meaning to the word!

As I keep at this, I find new directions to explore; some of these appear near the top of Gallery II and include both acrylic and watercolor paintings.