2010013101 (Utah)
oil on panel
12″ x 12″
2010
$500

2010013001 (Snake River at Twin Falls, ID)
oil on panel
10″ x 10″
2010
$400

Alan Wiseman, in The World Without Us, describes the primeval forest that once covered the better part of Europe, one last remaining chunk of which is the Bialowieza Puszcza in Poland. The beginning of the passage (in fact, the first line of the book), reads:

You may never have heard of the Bialowieza Puszcza. But if you were raised somewhere in the temperate swathe that crosses much of North America, Japan, Korea, Russia, several former Soviet republics, parts of China, Turkey, and Eastern and Western Europe—including the British Isles—something within you remembers it.

And further:

To enter it is to realize that most of us were bred to a pale copy of what nature intended. Seeing alders with trunks seven feet wide, or walking through stands of the tallest trees here—gigantic Norway spruce, shaggy as Methuselah—should seem as exotic as the Amazon or Antarctica to someone raised among the comparatively puny, second-growth woodlands found throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Instead, what’s astonishing is how primally familiar it feels. And, on some cellular level, how complete.

I don’t doubt for a second that our ancestry leaves us somehow coded to feel at home in a certain landscape. But this is my heritage, Europe, and I am drawn to something else entirely.

There is no greater comfort for me than the endless expanse of the open prairie. I feel it in my bones when I am in the landscape. It feels like home. This draw has certainly been at the root of almost all the artwork I have done over the past, say, fifteen years. And it is part of what I am doing now. Perhaps my more recent ancestry — my grandparents and great-grandparents worked the land in Nebraska –  has re-coded my genes. Perhaps I have been tuned to a new frequency — that of the unbroken horizon.

2010012901 (Alberta)
oil on panel
10″ x 10″
2010
sold

Grumpy, clumsy morning in the studio, and it shows. Just couldn’t get my head in the game this morning. Even cleaning brushes, which is usually really enjoyable for me, was a chore.

Readers — how do you get your head on straight for working when it’s not coming naturally?

2010012801
oil on panel
12″ x 12″
2010
$500

2010012701
oil on panel
10″ x 10″
2010
$400

2010012601 (Nebraska)
oil on panel
12″ x 12″
2010
NFS

2010012501
oil on panel
9″ x 9″
2010
$350

2010012401 (Oregon Coast)
oil on panel
9″ x 9″
2010
$350