White unto Harvest the colors of Ukraine

Behold, the fields are white unto harvest, 12 x 12 acrylic 

“Behold, the fields are white unto harvest,” and then suddenly colors of freedom loving #Ukraine, blues and yellows only just happened. Life to freedom. Death to tyrants and their USA toadies.

Palette knives, on gallery wrapped canvas. Soon available at In Your Eye Studio and Gallery in Paseo Arts District

Harvest's home, Thanksgiving

"Harvest's Home," 5 x 7 watercolor holiday greeting card

"Lay by in store," wrote the Apostle Paul to the Corinthian Christians long ago, urging them to save their gifts for those in need.

That phrase has an agrarian  basis, as rural people always took their harvests and prepared for the coming winter--whether canning garden  fruit and vegetables, or putting up feed in barns.

I suspect the Pilgrims did the same 401 years ago when they celebrated harvest with the first Thanksgiving.

Barns always catch my attention, and become painting subjects, even though I'm more urban and rural. Why? Don't know one reason, but perhaps one is that they are home to harvests...laying by in store during hard times.

Summer Shadows on the Great Plains

"Cloud Shadows on the Great Plains," 14 x 20, 300 lb d'Arches cold press paper

When you live on the Great Plains in the summer, the heat and humidity build clouds of all shapes and sizes.
When you can see a long way out there, across the rolling rural landscapes, the clouds  ever-changing shadows dance across the fields and hills in a windy, moving symphony of shapes and color.
Today's watercolor, the largest I've painted in a long while, is a larger version inspired by by the previous one, "Room to Breathe." That became sort of a "study" or warm-up by the intimidation I feel when working on large paintings.
Given the pandemic and the racial crisis we're trying to survive, 
I  thought of  T.S. Eliot's lines from "The Wasteland" that capture some of the truth we're living in now. 

            “Between the idea
        And the reality
        Between the motion
        And the act
        Falls the Shadow”

It's interesting to me how often I think of poetry and literature when I'm painting, and our national mood seems to be a metaphoric wasteland. 
To offset that, I wanted to try to capture the peace, beauty and vastness of the Great Plains. To me they're also a metaphor for our freedoms and future. I hope this painting approaches it. Can't wait to get it framed.
The colors on this photo are not exact, because it's taken outside and reflects some of the blue of the sky, but it's close. My signature is under the big fence post, which the camera lost the detail on.

Painting months, part 1

Next month is World Watercolor Month with the challenge for one a day. Accepted.
But May and June have been a blur of obligations, schedules with painting squeezed in, some completed at In Your Eye Gallery in Paseo. Most have been posted on Instagram, instead of this blog.

 Time for an update, more for the record than repetition.
Most recent were yesterday's 8 by 10s, representational and abstract of a turquoise doorway and adobe, "Doorway to/for My Dreams."

I've noticed that several of my works, completed at the gallery and relatively small at 5 x 7s, have to do with mortality.
Four bison, "Sunset," Alone," "Into the Sunset," (8 x 10), "You're Getting Too Close," and two travelers and a harvest, "End of Day," "Into the Storm," "Harvest Nightmare."