Gathering Storms

"Gathering Storms," 16" x "20 acrylic on gallery-wrapped canvas

Violence seems to rule our lives these days, at home and in the world, as storms gather on all horizons.

The only places where people are smiling, completely out of touch with reality, are in the stupid TV commercials, trying to sell happiness, no matter the product.

Gathering storms--the war in Ukraine, with a real threat of another world war on the horizon. The infuriating proof of the Jan. 6 treasonous riot at the capitol, with another coup threatened. The string of mass shootings, as the NRA ownership of Congress, looms as more disaster at anyplace, anytime. The variant spreading pandemic, and climate change threatening human extinction. 

I find relief and peace from the maelstrom of threats and bad news only in reading the insights of religious mystics, in happy moments with families, in traveling the back roads, and in painting.

Even it takes effort to shake off the gathering storms. But again, I somehow returned to the valiant colors of The Ukraine, in a similar effort to my earlier smaller watercolor, "Storm Over Freedom."

Here it is, after a week of work, dedicated again to the Ukrainians fighting for freedom and survival against the war criminal Russians and their neo-Hitler.

Creative drought relief

"Sunset Storm," 8 x 10, 140 lb. d'Arches cold press

When creativity seems to dry up...drought can be an obscure or ill-defined mood or feeling. And finally, after frustration and dissatisfaction,  relief arrives for different reasons.
To break a drought, you need to get out of your comfort zone, take risks and attempt anything, because what has worked in the past isn't working, hence the drought.
Thus it is for me, today's watercolor, the first I've really been satisfied with in quite a while. 

Storm a'coming

"Storm a'Coming," Today's watercolor, 5.5 by 8.5

On the Great Plains, you can see the weather coming. 
Rural people know how to read the sky, the changes, the dangers, the blessings. We sit in our urban homes, read the internet or TV radar maps and forecasts, the horizons obscured by buildings and traffic. 
I love the  weather maps...they tell me what I would  already know if I lived in a ranch house where, as Willa Cather put it 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."

Red sky in morning--Oklahoma

Oklahoma morning, 5 1/2 by 8 1/2 watercolor, 140# d'Arches

Oklahoma morning, storm a'coming.
If you don't get up early, you miss brilliant color in Oklahoma and much of nature's beauty.
The old saying "Red sky in morning, sailors take warning, red sky at night, sailors' delight" does apply considering our forecast, but of more delight to me today were the brilliant colors just before sunrise. 
Yes, soon the skies turned gray, but this image, minus the trees bare trees out my window, called for a painting. Blue skies and clouds turning rose colored from the sun still below the horizon, and distance Oklahoma hills.
Colors used, trying to match nature's brilliance--Cobalt Blue, Ultramarine Blue, Cadmium Red, Alizarin Crimson, Quinacridone Rose,  Permanent Rose, Aureolin, Quinacridon Sienna.