"Following Along" - a few recent pieces

 "Following Along"

8x10; oil on panel

 "Orchard"

10x8; oil on panel

"Juicy"

8x8; oil on panel

"Waiting" - paintings and music by William Hoshal

Well, all I can say is that it's time for me to get off my you know what and start posting in here again ...to that end.....

"Waiting" 

(plein air landscape studies and music)

Rediscover....

Oak Creek Boulders
8x10, oil

Had an interesting thing happen this evening as I was packing up to leave the studio. A couple pulled in to the OJHS (Old Jerome High School) parking lot with an Airstream in tow and asked if I knew of a good place to camp for the night. I informed them that there were a couple of places nearby, but that the best place was about a half hour away in Sedona. Right on Oak Creek, base o Schnebly Hill, amongst the red rocks, etc...I might be a bit partial because I live there full-time, nevertheless....I told them I was heading that way if they wanted to follow me.

As I got in the truck to head down the hill, through the town of Cottonwood, and out into the Verde Valley to Sedona, it struck me how extraordinary a thing it was that not only would I offer to lead somebody over twenty miles across the valley, but that they would trust me enough to follow a stranger down a road they clearly had never driven, to a place they had never been. Just a couple of years ago, I might have eyed these folks with suspicion wondering "what's this guy's angle?" And I would've assumed they were doing the same.

With this in the front of my mind, we set off towards Sedona. As we got closer, I realized how it must have looked to them; traveling down this strange piece of highway, the landscape changing from scrub and grasses to juniper and pinion, each curve revealing an ever-changing series of red rock cliffs and formations until you're sitting at the very base of these amazing monuments while waiting for a red light near New Frontiers grocery.

It's not that I take our unbelievable natural surroundings for granted. Each day I drive to the grocery store, it's all I can do to not pull over and gaze at the rocks -- often I don't make it and I think "I live here!"...But it's different when you consider it in terms of a first timer. Tonight, an even stronger level of thankfulness swept over me as I remembered that, come tomorrow, I don't have to leave this place. That I get to go back to Jerome and paint. And I don't have to go back to being suspicious of everyone's motives every moment of every day. That even though there is still ugliness and danger out there....right now, in this place...as the brilliant Michael Workman puts it, "There are still good things."

Plein air study: "Oak Creek Boulders" 8x10, oil on panel

White Rock in shadow

"Wilson Mountain"
8x10; oil

Not as easy as it sounds.....

No revelations -- when I get one about this, you'll be the first to know

Plein air study: "Wilson Mountain"

Near Home.....

"Home Away From Home"
8x10 study; oil

In need of a break from red rock madness, I looked around for something a little different. At this point in my fledgling painting life, I'm just looking to paint anything from life....but in this case, after four days baking in the Arizona sun, I was being a wimp. What I was really looking for was: what can I paint without leaving the cover of my patio?

Since we live full-time in our RV in a beautiful park on the banks of Oak Creek, the most obvious choice was: an RV. Not all that exciting...but it made for a good exercise.

A friend and I always talk about critical elements to paintings. In landscapes, it seems important to me that someone viewing the painting should feel that it would be someplace they might like to spend some time. Several months ago, I saw a painting of an RV park in American Artist magazine that had exactly that feel to it....I tried to capture a modicum of this as best I could in this little sketch. It will definitely be a guiding concept when I do some future paintings from the comfort of home....

sketch: "Home Away From Home" 8x10; oil

Insanity of Red Rocks

From Schnebly Hill
6x8

Don't get me wrong...I'm having a great time trying to figure these guys out. But as anyone who has been to Sedona - or the rest of the Colorado plateau for that matter - these rocks screw with you. The light changes about every twenty minutes, you start to lose yourself in the cracks and crags, and then there's the whole temperature thing.

I'm not talking about the desert heat. I'm talking about the fact that there are cool green colors in front of warm red colors -- something quite different than the usual cool colors receding into the background.

Second study: from Schnebly Hill