This is a lovely stream near the ski area in Santa Fe. I’ve always wanted to let the outside area of a painting be allowed to remain unfinished and this is my first foray in that direction.

This is another large one that I started a while ago, and which was beyond me. I set it aside for a couple of years and then resurrected it (I hope) as a gouache using pointillism.

I began this around 1990 as a watercolor, but was too consumed by work to make much progress. Much later (2008)  I attempted to resuscitate it, but I had lost the original photograph and ruined it as a watercolor, so I painted over it in gouache from a slightly different one.

About a mile past Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, New Mexico is a lovely wild section of the Chama river. This was from a trip there in November of 2012.

My wife and I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in July of 2012. Once we got through the move I wanted to start working on some paintings of this area. This is the first.

When I first moved to California in 1982, I lived in Santa Cruz, and would occasionally borrow one of my housemates cars and go driving up in the Santa Cruz mountains at night. In fall of 2012 I revisited that area. This is a watercolor from the side of the road near the fire station up there. It’s their Christmas lights that cause the blue spill on the right side.

This is a lovely small town in Vermont, near where I used to work at the Farm & Wilderness camps long ago and where we would go for our days off sometimes. I revisited it and took some photos there one night and made this painting from that. As I periodically do, I ruined this one as a watercolor close to the finish line and reworked the ruined areas as gouache.  I was happy that this won a special juror award at the Society of Watercolor Artists, and first prize at the Spring Show of the New Mexico Watercolor Society.

I was working on a commercial in the Czech Republic and we were shooting in a lovely forest about an hour ( a hair raising hour, given our driver)  outside of Prague. I wandered around during the downtime and found this lovely creek. Painting this was a little like those people you sometimes see dragging tires around outside fitness clubs, though. I’m sure it was very good for me.

This is from an early morning mountain bike ride on Mt. Tamalpais. This area was so beautiful, I stopped and wandered around in awe. Happily, this piece won first place at the Marin Society of Artists exhibition that year.

Another image from Vermont. I was a bit overconfident when starting this one, and was chastened by it. (I generally am chastened as I work!)