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.

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.