Late Summer Creek

Last weekend the family gathered on Lacamas Creek to disperse my brother`s ashes into the water. Ritual usually annoys me but this was moving. We pushed Mom a half mile in a wheelchair on a dirt trail to get there. Gary left us too soon.

Oneanta Gorge [2002 and 2009]

I hope to walk up this amazing 'slot' canyon this weekend. There is a huge logjam at the mouth but beyond, it`s an easy stroll through the water. My old friend Lake will be here for a visit. She was 28 and I was 19 when we met. Now she`s 64 and I`m 55. I wonder if we can get over those logs?

Headlands

Most painting bloggers I suspect, feel a mounting impulse to post something even if there isn`t any newly complete work. It`s been a week.
This is a couple of years old now and it was painted from a tiny sketch I drew while visiting the redwoods and the Northern California coast in 1988. Even something small and half hearted can bloom into a more realized painting many years into the future.

Slow creek in Summer 5

This is the elongated canvas I`ve been working on. It may be finished but I`m sure there will be some tweaks.

Bosque and Moonlight

That`s Spanish for woodlands and it`s what the beautiful groves of cottonwoods along the Rio Grande River are called. The nocturne is a tricky beast. When successful, think Whistler and Ryder, they emit a subtle radiance. Miscalculate the values and they can suck in light like an imploding dwarf star.

regroup

I had been working on a long horizontal canvas, another effort to develop a 'narrative' landscape, when my father died. This idea has merit. I want to paint something long and narrow with so much activity, one 'reads' it. I`m not at all sure what that will look like. So until I complete it and/or photograph another new piece, here is a watercolor from 1990.

my father is gone

Joseph Tipton July 29,1922-September 6, 2009. A kind, compassionate man.

December Fog

The weather in Western Oregon is of course, notorious. As I was preparing to move here from New Mexico, everybody asked me 'what about the rain'? I answered that I craved it, belonged to it, almost like a racial or ancestral memory. This has proven so true.
In between storms in early winter a very cold fog can settle in for days. It is thrilling.

Snowfield-Auke Bay

Joan and Frederic are tough to follow.
Here is an oil painting based on a sketch I did on a ferry in Alaska [2000].