Where humans are small

"Sunset Storm on the Great Plains," 11 x 14, watercolor, 300 lb. d'Arches cold press paper

"Out here is the sky," I've written of my fascination with the dominating skies of the Great Plains and West, which influence so much of my art work.
My computer is full of photos I and others have taken of the skies, the clouds. They are fluid and expansive in an expansive, but arid land.
I'm always reminded of Willa Cather's sentence, she a child of the great Plains,  in Death Comes for the Archbishop: "Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky."
I've neglected painting the skies recently, and my art has suffered, and my wife is prodding me to return. I've learned more about color and composition and more in the past year, but the skies are calling.
Thus this morning's lesson, reflecting my learning, and my yearning, for the wide open spaces.
Palette--orange, magenta, Alizarin Crimson, Opera, Ultamarine blue, touch of Phalo Blue.

December drama

"December Drama," 5 by 7 watercolor card

"Out here there's the sky," I say, describing the influences on my painting. 
December brings its own aerial drama to the Great Plains, different from the thunderheads and storms of spring and summer.
Whether is cold clear night air, or cloudy skies with a hint of snow, or dawn and sunset though, when light is at the extremes, moods reflect the beauty overhead.
While mountains are in my soul, I find myself attracted in art more and more to the color and drama

of those wide-open spaces and places underneath that vast sky.

(Day 13 of daily December watercolors)

Travel fever

The  latest issue of Oklahoma Today is out, and it makes you just want to get in the car and go. www.oklahomatoday.com

The first attention getter was a Shane Bevel photo of a lonely rural road and big skies accompanying Editor Steffie Cocoran's opening column. Deeper inside was the story, about the "Great Western Cattle Trail" by Jim Logan, with more  Bevel photos of vast lands and vaster skies. The magazine is fortunately featuring more large photography as it did in its early years.

I think we've all been down those highways.

Then to surprise me was friend-poet-publisher Jeanetta Calhoun Mish's "Remembering Number 9" about trips down a rural Oklahoma highway in her life.  In additon to other articles, there's veteran Oklahoma journalist-writer Sheila Bright's selection of the weird and wonderful places in Oklahoma. Yep, it's the travel issue, including articles by my former student and Associate Editor Megan Rossman, and Managing editor Nathan Gunter about the new Myriad Gardens.

I recommended William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways to both Steffie and Jeanetta. My son Travis takes a copy with him when he travels on his motorcycle. I guess I should read it again, but I'm already cooped up. after reading this issue.

"Wrapped in ribbons of sky,
 the allure of the West is unmistakable."
--Blurb accompanying Steffie's column.

 Need to travel. Need to write. Need maps. Travel fever.

No wonder I had to change the photo at the top of my blog.