Is It Really November?

I can’t believe it’s been another four months … FOUR MONTHS! … since I’ve noodled around in here.  But nope, no apologies, no explanations other than those I’ve already made in previous posts.  And no more promises to be here regularly.  At this point I’m pretty well convinced that life will do its thing and, though I’ll try to swim against the current, I’m not going to beat myself up for going with the flow.  Hey!  For once I actually created a metaphor that wasn’t mixed!!!  

So what’s new with me and my artsy-fartsy stuff?  Lots, actually.  In fact that’s one reason I haven’t been exercising my writing skills … I’ve been doing fun visual stuff instead.  I’m going to include a couple of new pieces here which will sort of tie in to the time of year and season.  

As always, a click into the images will take you over to my website where the pics will be visible at a better resolution and with a smaller watermark.  And again, not to stir up any hornets’ nests, but yeah I do put watermarks on my online stuff.  But be aware that if you are sufficiently wildly in love with anything and want to make a purchase, the watermarks won’t be on your wall art … or your tote bag or your coffee mug or anything else.  Promise!!

What I’m going to add today are a couple of autumn landscapes.  Though it’s now mid-November, which is still fall, the brilliant colors we love have mostly turned to taupe.  Other than the occasional snow-storm, we can pretty much count on taupe and shades of gray and brown from now until spring.  So let’s take a minute to glory in the magic some of us enjoyed within the past few weeks.  

The above is “Autumn’s Glow.”  Nothing I like better than a drive down old country roads in autumn.  I admit that getting lost (well, and then finding my way back again of course) used to be half the fun, but with the advent of GPS and Waze that’s a lot harder to do now.  Still, back when I took the original photo which inspired this digital painting, GPS systems were, well, if not unheard of, scarce.  I certainly didn’t have one.  I’m not exactly sure of the location, but it’s probably Montgomery County, Maryland. Probably somewhere near Tridelphia Lake or maybe just over into Howard County.  Either way, it was a glorious day and I really enjoyed painting it up to recreate such a brilliant and vivid vision.

“Almost There” is me driving down another country road, this time up in the Laurel Highlands of Central Pennsylvania.  The road I’m on takes us from the town of Pavia, which is about halfway between Bedford and Altoona, up 3000 feet to the top of Blue Knob Mountain, in Claysburg, PA.  Once again digitally hand painted, this image is also inspired by / based on one of my older photos.  

I went up to Blue Knob 3 weekends in a row this fall with high hopes of adding to my collection of bright autumn images, but our extremely dry summer (2019) … (it was one of the wettest on record last year) … seemed to have nixed our fall color season.  At least I didn’t see anything exciting.  

For those of you in the parts of the world who never get to see anything like the colors in the above two images, I assure you … it really does happen.  Not every year is bright and colorful, but every year does bring hopes and expectations that we’ll get to see the magic.  Because when all the elements do come together, it is magic.