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Caverly Pond and Mt Katahdin

8 x 10 oil on Birch Panel

I have recently returned from a long weekend of painting and exploring at Baxter State Park in Northern Maine.  For five days I was lost in color, reflections, mountains, ponds, sun, clouds, and air.  The days temperatures ranged from 'too-hot-to-stand-in-the-sun' to 'I'm-really-cold -- I -wish-I-had-another-layer-to put-on'.  The colors were spectacular.  The days of painting could not have been better.  As I sit in my studio and write this, I am surrounded by six Plein Air paintings completed in the past three weeks.  Each radiates fall:  gold, amber, green, bright red, and soft purple. the colors and intensity of the season.  One was painted at Acadia Park at Duck Steam Flowage.  All the rest were completed in and around Baxter Park.

Elbow Pond and OJI Mountain - Baxter State Park

The intensity of color in these paintings led me to look again at a painting completed in the Spring when I was in search of new color and one completed in the heat of the summer.

Spring Gold - Monroe, Maine

Pastel

Summer Field - Blue Hill, Maine

12 x 16 - Oil on canvas

Duck Pond Flowage - Acadia National Park

11 x 14 oil on panel

As a painter who works outside throughout the year, I am blessed by the season's changes.  Each holds a nugget of gold, a rising Spirit:

Gentle spring, soft in emerging colors. 

She tantalizes my dreams of summer, then teases us with a cold windy rain.

Her colors are soft and golden on the hills

Her sky agitated and full.

Cool summer grove, welcome rest from the heat.

It is quiet in the grove.  Field ripens.

Painting is the process of savoring this place and this time,

Thanking the tree and field, the air and water,

and the glorious cool grove.

Intense Fall.

Color explosion everywhere.

When I paint I am engulfed in the energy from Mother Earth.

Colors I hardly use other times of the year spread onto my palette:

cadmium red, intense yellow, deep dark red, greens in counterpoint with orange.

There is nothing soft about painting in the Fall.

It is pure joy!

and sometimes can only be seen as a reflection of something very large and very real!

Reflections of OJI Mountain - Baxter State Park

11 x 14 - oil on panel