I love the way this Mesa glows just before the sun sets.
“Ghost House”
“Ghost House” is a beautiful old adobe built around 1880, rich with stories, many of them ghost stories. Cattle thieves, local legend, and Georgia O’Keefe…if only the old adobe walls could talk.
“Gallo Blanco”
Rooster white. Farm beautiful.
“Rain Before Dark”
I love to look out over this alfalfa field, and watch the clouds roll in, bringing the cool wind with it.
“Tom at Work”
This an artist friend of mine named Tom. I got to spend a week in the work shop with him taking a class called fantasy bird house building. It reminded me of being with Santa during July, and it wasn’t just the white beard and jovial disposition. First he had us sketch out our houses, and then with a chuckle and a twinkle in his eye he would brainstorm on how to make our dreams come true. My bird house was a beautiful church with not one, but two stained glass windows, lots of elaborate iron work, a copper roof, and he let me build much of it with a baby on my hip. What a great week, my 7 year old learned to use a drill press, and my dream house became a reality.
“The Red Sand Hut”
The red sand hut is a cross between a shanty town in South Africa and a Norman Rockwell painting. It is what happens when you mix brothers, sisters, and friends old and new, and you give them an afternoon of device-free down time. They built the hut into the side of a Mesa with scraps of lumber, drift wood, and old metal. Then they defended it with stick swords and metal trash can shields. As I painted this, I loved playing with the lost edges between the kids skin and the red dirt. It seems that if their skin and the dirt weren’t the same color when the day started, they became more and more so as the afternoon passed on.
Abiquiu to Ruidoso
Anyone who has traveled with children in the car knows what it is like to spend a month in a car one day. Often, road trip time feels slow – sometimes I am in the right frame of mind to savor and enjoy time passing. This was one of those days. We drove from Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico, down to Ruidoso. The children slept, the rain fell, and we savored the drive – we watched the landscape unfold and open up around us, and we accepted the gift that was simply being present. It would take a month to paint the drive from this day, perhaps I will try.
paintandsimple 