The words read: 

The world is full of magic and miracles.

If you cannot see the colors,

it may be time for you to move

to a less cluttered view.

This was an incredibly exciting and satisfying image to paint.  It is so rich and so vibrant and so warm.  I love this piece.  And when I look at this painting, I see how far my work has come.  I see in this piece so many of the themes and tools that have been evolving through many of my paintings this past year.  This painting seems more free, more expressive than anything that has come before.  More experiential, too.  Like just seeing it live in person can carry you somewhere new.  Reckoning fills me with hope.

This image continues my interest in the subtle inclusion of language in art with two sentences painted in tiny black letters at the bottom of the image.  They read, "The world is full of magic and miracles.  If you cannot see the colors, it may be time for you to move to a less cluttered view."  I am convinced that many of the troubles we face in modern society stem from overcrowding.  I think we would all be better people if we lived on open land and we went to bed each night having watched the sun set over uninterrupted nature.  How can we have perspective on our lives when we are always surrounded with our own inventions, our own buildings, our own devices?  I know that I always feel better when I can put the works of man into perspective by witnessing an ancient river or standing with a solid old mountain.

I am hopeful that this large, sweeping landscape will open up the home of some fellow lone wolf out there and bring you a peaceful bit of the wild.

How Reckoning was created.....   Oh my.  I cannot begin to explain how this one evolved.  I have been working on this piece for a long time.  Adding layers here and there as time allowed.  The beautiful undulating black lines of this piece are three-dimensional ridges that I created with my fingers, pushing high-viscosity black acrylic paint into naturally irregular lines.  Then I used palette knives for many of the layers of color that followed.  I used wide soft brushes to apply some transparent washes.  And a soft cloth to rub through some of those washes.  I finished the piece with tiny detail brushes.  Lots of other stuff happened in between, but I cannot recall the exact sequence or all of the individual steps.  This one was a labor of love consuming many many hours of serious painting.  But all of that work was so worth it.  I am thrilled with this luminous piece.

(The staple-free 1.5" deep sides of this canvas have been painted black. This is a digital photo. The scans above are more accurate.)

Honor was painted on a fine, hand-stretched canvas. A fellow in Arizona makes these just for professional artists. It is incredibly sturdy, built on hefty kiln-dried wood that will keep your painting in proper shape for generations. The sides of the canvas have been lightly textured and painted black providing a striking profile and allowing you to display your new painting unframed if you like.

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