It’s half past midnight. dog is asleep on the couch to my left. There’s a big orange tabby in one of the boxes behind my canvas, and almost 13-year-old Thing2 is passed out on the nearby TV room couch, worn out from the first third of our weekend Star Wars marathon (The first of many in anticipations of the next release in the series). It’s the perfect time to start work on the S-side — the summer side — of my painted screen.

At 6 feet tall by 4 feet wide, right now it’s a hot mess. It’ll take a while to see something emerge, but there’s nothing like a little creative work out at half past midnight.

I’m starting the first side of a painted screen. The screen is going to have a winter scene on one side and a summer scene on the other. It may seem contradictory, but the winter side is starting with the red-hot toned canvas.

Most Vermonters seem to have an aversion to the extremes of the summer heat (mind you, in Vermont, extreme heat starts with temps in the high 80s). No matter how hot it gets, however, there is an unwritten rule that we won’t complain about the heat. It’s a silent acknowledgment that we will all be shoveling snow in a few months for a lot more months.

Shoveling aside, winter is the time of year when I feel most alive, a realization that crystallized over the last few years when Thing1’s illness had us traveling the snowy roads through the mountains to the hospital every week. The drives were sometimes treacherous but always stunningly beautiful whether there was a foot of fresh powder everywhere or a muddy landscape filled with stark purples and greys. Summer can be beautiful, but it also lulls. Winter makes magic, it demands to be navigated and noticed. It is fraught nerves and cool pink fire in a sky filled with purple powdered clouds.

And underneath the ice and white paint, it’s red hot.

I ordered a paintable canvas screen to try and replicate a project from last year on a larger scale. The canvas wasn’t all I hoped, but Big Fat Kitty-Cat and I are prepping it to try and salvage it. We’re each making our special contributions to the job.

i’ve been waiting for the water on a new lake painting to dry enough to go to the next step, but I needed to paint. Whenever I’m stuck, my favorite view, the when I know best, got the tubes open and the pigment flowing.

I’ve been monkeying with the blog tonight, so email subscribers may see a few posts repeated in their feeds. I apologize for the disruption 😦

The big guy has been having trouble with his foot while we’re on vacation. It’s laid him up in bed so he hasn’t been able to go out to see some of our favorite spots, aside from one or two lunches out at our new, favorite Mexican place.

The kids are old enough to take them selves to the beach with their cousins these days so I’ve been taking advantage of quiet time in the mornings to try and paint. It’s a new experience for me to paint water (I’ve taken thousand pictures of the lake but always been intimidated by trying to do a straight line). I finally found a view of the light house South Haven, Michigan that seemed like a good trial run. It didn’t end up being a masterpiece, but it’ll make some nice hotel art for the big guy while he’s recuperating in paradise.

I got to bed later than intended on Friday night, but when the alarm went off at 6 AM on Saturday morning, it didn’t take a single doggy kiss on my face to squash the urge to hit the snooze button and hop right out of bed. It was Norman‘s Attic day. Run by Episcopal Church in the center of Arlington, VT,  Norman‘s Attic is an annual combination tag sale/flea market/craft fair comprised of 50 to 75 vendors.

An early sale turned the rest of my day into profit, as the first customer of the day, a visitor from Virginia enjoying his annual holiday, picked out a painting and some cards. We chatted about his neck of the woods and mine. A little later an old friend stopped by to see how my husband was doing after recent car accident (he’s ok). Another out-of-towner bought some notecards and prints, and we talked about her trips from Florida to New England. All through the day,  passing friends stopped to catch up on the summer news, and, as the day wore on, I remembered why I love doing the markets in Arlington. 

The markets offer the chances to sell artwork, but for vendors and customers alike, even for out-of-towners, it’s a chance to see and be seen and to connect. I was still thinking about the warm glow of connection when my phone popped up the notification of the news from El Paso, TX.

I was on the way to the grocery store and dinner with the Big Guy and the kids and decided to keep the news to myself until this morning. There was, after all, nothing I could do to change anything at that moment. The next notification popped up announcing another slaughter in Dayton, Ohio as we walked to the car to drive home. Again, I kept the news to myself, but, as we drove, I wondered what could be done? What can  any of us do?

Just as with the massacre in California a week ago, the victims in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio were going about their daily lives when someone who had disconnected himself from society did what we once thought of as the unthinkable. I don’t know enough about the gun laws currently on the box or the types of guns available to make any productive arguments about gun control, but I do know a little bit about disconnection. I see it every day.

I teach girls who have become disconnected from themselves and from society because of abuse and mental illness. While they are disconnected, they act out in ways that hurt themselves and people around them. It takes time, but when people reach out to these girls and engage them, when they begin to rebuild connections, the acting out begins to disappear. 

This morning as I thought about the hideous acts happening in public places, my first instinct was to consider abandoning public spaces until they are safer. Abandoning the places, however, it means abandoning the people in them. It means disconnecting from them, and, I know that more disconnection is not a part of any solution.

A strong line of storms passed over good part of Michigan this morning, and behind it was sun and wind and pure energy. It was too blustery to take a camera to the landing, but sketchbooks and pens are less susceptible to damage when blown out of hand into the sand, and I wanted to capture the feeling as much as the shapes of the trees standing in against the bluff and the water.

Sometimes the best work brews in the quiet before the literal and figurative storms of life. Other times, ideas body slam into you as the storm whirls. I love the body slams. They invigorate. They scintillate, and, somehow, in the midst of the howling wind, they are a source of calm.

I got up early this morning to drive around and get some sketches for paintings this week. I wanted a different view of Southwestern Michigan than the infinite faces of the lake pictures I take and paint.

I got up early this morning to drive around and get some sketches for paintings this week. I wanted a different view of Southwestern Michigan than the infinite faces of the lake pictures I take and paint.

An hour after I left, I got a call from my husband warning me of impending dangerous weather, and, not having found any inspiring views, I had at home. As I pulled in the mile long fire drive, I heard the first claps of thunder. I pulled into the last parking space just as the sky began to turn purple. I walked through our house to the other side that faces the lake, ran to the edge of the bluff to greet the huge, purple bank of clouds heading towards us — the next of the lake’s infinite, powerful faces.

I’ll let the video below do the rest of my talking except to I’ll let the video below do the rest of my talking except to quote a dear friend by asking, “Ain’t nature grand?”

One of my favorite paintings happened in about 10 minutes. It sold in five. I painted it on a night very much like tonight. It was a bit stormier, But the main pieces — the intensity of the light and the parts of nature we haven’t yet tamed — were the same.

An incredibly busy work week had ended with a 16 hour drive to Lake Michigan and a meeting with the lake. Standing on the landing, looking towards Chicago and the storms that would and will come across the lake overnight, everything else disappeared. There was only sky and sea (Lake Michigan is almost as big as a sea) and a meeting with the heavens.

Last time I went back to my paints to try to put that feeling of all and insignificance and, somehow, preciousness, onto paper. Tonight I am probably going to do the same because this meeting with the heavens reminds me of why I paint. It reminds me of the gift of these kinds of moments and how much I want to pass them on.