July 2025

For many years when our kids and grandkids were growing up we did an annual winter weekend in the mountains. We would rent a cabin in the Sierra, usually near Arnold, and spend lots of time playing in the snow. I also enjoyed just wandering around taking photos. I liked places with lots of smooth, untracked snow. This painting was inspired by a shot from 2005.

June 2025

 

On one of our days in Big Sur, we hiked around at Point Lobos State Park. As on previous visits, we had to park out on the highway, but once we were on the trails, it was beautiful as always. I was taking lots of photos of the scenery but then we came across this painter and I thought it made a nice complement to the landscape. I felt like expressing my appreciation of her painting, but I didn't want to disturb her concentration. I know how annoying an interruption can be when you are really focused on your work.

I looked through some old photos for a painting idea and came across one of a gull on the beach at Patrick's Point State Park. The photo didn't have much color so I tried to add a little more, maybe not very successfully. There is still something that I like about it, though.

I felt like painting something with buildings, and I found a photo from our three days in Paris in 2000. We were wandering around from our hotel and I looked for an ordinary street scene. I had lots of photos to choose from but this one caught my eye somehow.

May 2025

Near the end of April, we went to a clinic at Chris Ellsworth's place near Placerville. It was cold and wet much of the time but there was a good group of people and we had fun. At the end of the last day Chris got on his horse, Picasso, and loped around the arena. I tried taking a couple of photos, hoping for something to paint, but they weren't ideal. Then I looked at Maureen's phone and she had taken a video of the ride. I managed to find just the right frame and used it for this painting. The result was not as good as I had hoped. Maybe some more work on the background would have helped, but I didn't feel like spending any more time on it.

In mid-May, we spent four nights at the cabin near Big Sur. It was nice to get away and we did some good short hikes, but my memory of it is tainted by the fact that I somehow lost the cabin key and spent a stressful half day to fix the problem. On the way there, just before the turn off from highway 1 to Palo Colorado Road, there it this great view of the coast and just as I have done many times in the past, I pulled over and took another photo. Back at home, I painted it with memories of our recent trip.

Looking through some older photos, I came across one taken in 2004 of Little Lakes Valley. It's one of our favorite places to hike when we are in the eastern Sierra and I've taken many similar photos. Mosquito Flat at the end of the Rock Creek Road is the highest Sierra trailhead at 10,300 ft., and we definitely feel the altitude there. A mile or so up the trail takes you to a string of beautiful lakes surrounded by high peaks. We're planning to go back to Mammoth Lakes this September, but this hike, though short, may be beyond our ability now.

April 2025

In Capitol Reef N.P. there are the remains of an old farming community called Fruita. On our 2023 trip, we stopped there to visit a small gift shop. Nearby there was this old wagon and a barn with several horses. It was a picturesque spot and I took several photos. I used one of them for this painting.

Maureen saw that I was looking through old photos for a painting idea, and she pointed to a small painting on our living room wall and said "Why don't you paint that?" It was just about the only art that we had ever purchased. In 2000, we spent three days in Paris. On our last morning we were just about to leave on the train to London and we walked by this cafe near our hotel. It was "Les Deux Magots", a place that was a famous hangout for artists and intellectuals in the 30's. A street painter was working out in front, and on an impulse, we bought one of his paintings. The oil paint was still a bit wet and we had to be careful carrying it on the train with all of our luggage. I looked through our photos and found a couple from that time and put together this painting. It's a bit messy close up, but at a distance it brings back good memories.

On our 2000 trip, we spent a couple of days in Brecon, Wales. We went there to see the Brecon Beacons, a mountain range which is a National Park. We spent a day hiking up to the highest peaks (2907 ft.), and saw some great views. We also looked around the town a bit and came across this scene with a boat on one of the canals. We wanted to see some of Wales because we thought it would be different from England, but found it to be much the same except for the strange spellings of place names.

March 2025

Darby loved fetching sticks in a lake. He didn't get a lot of chances to do it around home, but he made up for it on our trips to the mountains. This painting was based on one of Maureen's photos from 2017 at McCloud Lake in the Mammoth area. I especially liked the reflections and ripples and liked the challenge of trying to make water look somewhat real.

I looked through our photos from our travels in 2000 for something to paint and I came across one from the village of Cushendun in Northern Ireland. We were driving around the Antrim coast with relatives Margaret and Bernard and Andrew and Stephanie enjoying the beautiful green hills and rugged coastline.

It was January 20, 2018, the one-year anniversary of the Women's March at the first Trump inauguration. We went to downtown Oakland and joined the march with many thousands of others. I thought it would be timely to paint something like this since there is lots of reason to protest these days. The mood feels different though. In 2018 people were feeling a lot more positive about being able to make changes. Today, I think that many of us have just about given up hope. I used a couple of Maureen's photos and one of mine to put together this scene of the crowd near Broadway and Telegraph, with the City Hall on the left and the Flatiron Building on the right.

Last September we spent several days at Mammoth Lakes. It was cold and windy much of the time and Maureen was recovering from her broken ribs and using oxygen, so like we often do, we took it easy on our first day and went out to the Sherwin Creek Campground and walked around a bit. The campground closes after Labor Day, so we had the area to ourselves. It is a beautiful spot right where the forested mountains meet the sagebrush covered high desert. I thought it could use a little something more, so I found a photo of a doe online and added it to the painting.

February 2025

 

In the summer of 1970, a friend and I were planning a weekend trip to the Yosemite area to do some hiking and camping. The friend cancelled at the last minute, but I still wanted to go. I took off after work on a Friday afternoon and around midnight found a place along the highway to lay my sleeping bag. Somewhere along the way I decided to climb Mt. Conness, a 12,590 ft. peak on the Sierra Crest north of Tioga Pass, so in the morning I continued on to Saddlebag Lake and started hiking. I had no idea about the best way to approach the climb so I went up past some small lakes and onto the good sized glacier. The steep snow was kind of scary without an ice axe, but when I got across it, I encountered the bergschrund, the crevice that is commonly found at the head of a mountain glacier. It appeared to be a formidable obstacle, but I found a snow bridge that I was able to carefully cross. About then I took the photo that I used for this painting. Once across, I was able to scramble up the cliff and make it to the summit. It was a very exciting and memorable climb, and today I felt like painting something to remember it by.

Maureen has an app on her phone that tells her when whales have been spotted along the coast. One day last August, she was alerted to whale sightings in Pacifica, so we drove over there to see. We walked out on the pier where we had seen whales once before, but only saw a couple of distant spouts. But it's an interesting place because of all the people out there fishing. They are a very diverse crowd all having a good time. I took a couple of photos with my phone and one became this painting.

Here's another one from our rides/hikes on the trail to the water tower. I guess that's because we do it so often and it's a pretty trail. Most of my views are of the rear end of the horses and riders because I walk slowly and I'm usually following behind. This was a scene where I just noticed the beautiful lighting and quickly snapped a photo. I tried to emphasize that in the painting.

In July, 1999, my friend Gerald and I did a 5-day backpacking trip out of Twin Lakes, near Bridgeport. Much of our route was off-trail and some of it was more climbing than hiking. Matterhorn Pass, the col between Matterhorn Peak and Whorl Mountain, was one of the hardest parts. This was the third time I had been over it, and it was still a bit scary. This painting is from a photo that I shot of Gerald scrambling down the east side.

January 2025

I frequently walk on a trail from our barn while Maureen rides Zim. I enjoy looking at a lot of stuff along the way, from distant views to close-ups. Last winter I looked closely at the many kinds of mushrooms that popped up after rainstorms and thought about painting some but didn't. Finally this year I found a nice little grouping of them growing on an old stump that had just appeared one day and I painted them.

I was thinking of painting something from the few photos that I have of old Boy Scout trips, and I came across a photo of the waterfall at Glen Aulin that I took in 1962. Five miles downstream from Tuolumne Meadows the river drops over several spectacular waterfalls and this would have been in late June, when there was a lot of water. This was the last of seven summer trips that I did with the scouts and I was using dad's old 35 mm. Kodak camera taking Kodachrome slides.

On our late afternoon walks at Mammoth Lakes, we usually go along the lakeshore and cross a bridge over part of the Twin Lakes. We probably have many photos of this same view from the bridge, but I especially like it. I chose a shot from last September to paint it again.

As I was looking through old slides, I came across one of the Tuolumne River at Tuolumne Meadows that I shot in 1962. This must have been on a weekend trip when my girlfriend, Rosemary, came along to camp with my family. I was hoping to capture the light on the water in the photo. I didn't really have a very good idea how to approach it, so I just dove in and worked quickly and loosely. In hindsight, a bit more planning and care may have helped, but the looseness makes it more lively.