Last summer I added one more painting from the John Muir Trail. On our way up to Silver Pass, we passed this marmot on the rocks. I could have zoomed in on the marmot, but I wanted this to be more about his rocky habitat. I felt that a close-up of the rocks said more to me about the place than the many expansive views in my photos.
When my painting class started up again in September, our first project was a trumpet player that Ron had photographed in New Orleans. I thought the background was a total mess when I started, but now that it is done, I like it.
Our second class project was to paint something for a holiday card. We had just returned from a couple of weeks in west coast Canada, and I wanted to do something from that. We had visited the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and saw these totem poles and houses in an outdoor exhibit. After days of gray skies, dark forests and wide views of sea and islands, I felt that the native artwork said a lot about this environment, so I tried to put it all together in this painting.
