Georgia on My Mind

Summer Song
Oil on canvas, 15x30

Call me at 860-442-0246 or email me

if you are interested in buying this painting

Yesterday, I had the great good fortune to go to the Whitney Museum in New York City and see, among other things, a collection of Georgia O'Keeffe's abstract paintings.

The pieces were fascinating, inspiring, evocative. It was exhilarating to think of these big ideas, these huge imaginings, coming from the small, hard-looking woman in Alfred Stieglitz's photos.

The paintings were not the absolute riot of color I'd thought they might be, though that brilliance presented itself in more than a few. Instead, I'd say the pieces were a song of control, hummed over a prayer of movement and the whisper, again and again, of color.

My favorite pieces were among the darkest, a trio of abstracts that transformed themselves for me into gray mountains, folds of the earth, thoughts of blindness, the lines and melding and pulling apart of marriage.

The show continues through Jan. 17. If you have the chance, go. It will feed your heart and your soul.

Thanks for reading!

A Lovely Spot

Benedict Park. Oil on stretched canvas

It's good to be back in Orange County. It's beautiful here, in a completely different way than where we live in Connecticut. It's wilder here, with mountains and fast rivers, lots of woods and a different kind of wind than you get near the ocean.

Our little house here is cool and shady in its riverside cathedral of trees. There has been some flooding - it rained nearly every day in June - but nothing catastrophic. The vegetation is undisturbed, the river sparkling and not too high, and if you didn't know there had been flooding, you'd never be able to tell.

I'm of such a mixed mind about our house here. Three potential sales have fallen through, and with each, I've felt sad, frustrated and angry - and also happy. It's nice to be able to stay here, with the sound of the river, and the tree frogs and the ducks and far-off coyotes. I know, too, that the market is going to recover at some point, and that that means a better price for our house.

But we owe money on it, and the taxes keep rising, and having the sales price in our bank account would make life so much easier.

So if you know anyone who would like a simple little house on a beautiful river, let me know. The first time a dry fly was cast in America, it was into the Neversink. There's still good fishing in our lovely river. There's great canoeing and rafting, and there's nothing more cooling on a steamy day than a swim in the clean water of the Neversink. There's wildlife year-round, wood ducks and mallards, egrets and herons, owls and hawks and eagles. There are fireflies and dragonflies and an army of hummingbirds.

Yes, the river floods from time to time, but on days like this, it seems a small price to pay for such wealth.