Poise Between Something and Nothing

(Five Days, Five Locations, Five Miles Apart: 7 Lakes Basin, WA)

Most predominant colors in the landscape of the Olympic National Forest’s High Divide Loop (7 Lakes Basin Trail) between September 19 – September 23 arranged vertically by predominance and horizontally by time/location: 5 days, 5 locations, 5 miles apart with a 3050 ft. elevation change.

The title taken From Rebecca Solnit’s collection of essays on landscape, gender and art, As Eve Said to the Serpent. Thoreau’s ideas on walking opened this essay. …’He praises what walking can do for thinking. Walking is nearly alone among all our human activities in its poise between doing something and doing nothing; it is not idleness, and yet as the legs move and the eyes gaze, the mind can roam with a kind of discipline hardly possible in an armchair, As the rhythm of the walk is interrupted by the surprises and irregularities of the landscape, so ideas arise from lengthy concentration interrupted by epiphanies.’

Oil on Wood Panel, 40 in. x 50 in.

Burn/Lush: Clark Fire Edge

The Clark Fire burned the old-growth forest of Fall Creek in 2003. The landscape’s colors are bisected as if a barrier wall had been erected. The left-half of the painting represents the colors of the burned area; the right-half refers to the colors of the old-growth forest.

Oil on Wood Panel, 30 in. x 45 in.