Marina Popova's Brain Pickings has introduced me to many writers and poets and their works. I frequently dig deeper into the books she features and surprisingly, or not, we are often exploring the same ideas or themes. Which was the case with Rebecca Solnit and her book 'a field guide to getting lost'. I am currently exploring the color blue. Actually, I've been reading and journaling about this color since Tori Amos sang about Cezanne's 16 shades of blue a few years ago

Today I read this passage from nature writer Ellen Meloy in her book The Anthropology of Turquoise.  These words reminded me so much of a painting I created in 2009 inspired not of the desert sky of which she was speaking in her eloquent essay but by the sky and water intersection off the coast of Washington state.  Ellen’s writing is new for me, but just in the first essay of the book I feel an affinity to her perceptions and the language she uses to describe the spirit of t

I often refer to my works as atmospheres.  Not a cloudscape or abstract landscape, but more a sensualness of a landscape–the feeling, emotion, mood that is evoked from a landscape or our relationship to it.  The word stimmung has presented itself periodically in my readings on art, most often by Wassilly Kandinsky who references the “stimmung” (roughly translated as the sentiment) of an artwork as “the lofty emotions beyond words” that enables artworks to “fulfill their pur