An excerpt from my all time favorite writer, thinker, and kindred spirit, George Sibley. He and I share a valley, and this is one of the most poetically honest self evaluations i have ever encountered.....
"But that day up the Slate River helped me think about it. I saw how cold the coming night was, but also how beautiful. For the time being, the parts of me that feel the cold and the parts of me that see the beauty are still bound up in this concatenation of contradictions generally known as me. An occasionally interesting but often tedious writer, an iconoclast whose unique visions are damped down to negligible by an unaccountable sense of personal inferiority, a 65-year-old orphan who never felt like a father even when he became one, a sometime teacher who hates discipline and “rigor,” an almost, a not-quite — I’ve begun to really appreciate the observable truth of the compost pile: that matter and energy are constant; that the assemblage of matter and energy into forms like me is often interesting but always imperfect; that what is ultimately important is the fact that every iota of matter and energy gets a lot of opportunities."
I'm busy on a large canvas of my "home range", as i have begun to call it. I have two easels going, so i may squeeze a daily in here soon.
As we near the solstice and the daylight keeps shrinking i may find myself doing more of these nocturnes. It was fun to put one little dab of orange light in that bulb...i saved it for the very last stroke. Looking at it now, though, it barely shows. Our little camera is really having trouble picking up detail in some of these smaller paintings, so i may look into getting a scanner. If anyone has any suggestions i'd love to hear them.
I should have called this one "an hour of my life that I'll never get back". It started out bad and went downhill from there.
I ran out of small canvases yesterday, so i'll be focusing on big pieces until i get my next shipment in a few days. This one is getting there, but i just realized how skewed this composition is when i saw it on the computer screen. This studio is too small for me to step back far enough to really get a feel for the big canvases. This range (the Anthracites) is my favorite to paint because of its graceful lines, but Smith Hill (the dark mass on the right, and one of several Smith Hills in the greater valley) always presents this compositional problem. I'll be tweaking the light and debating the comp the rest of today and tomorrow. I think i can play with the light enough to stay true to the actual composition of the valley. This one is far enough along, however, for me to start spinning the Leonard Cohen tunes... for some reason i always like to finish paintings to Leonard Cohen. Don't ask why. The finished piece will be on http://www.zthurmondfineart.com in a few days.
I've only done a few still lifes, and I think every one of them has been of this jar. This is the first time i've put the lettering on it, which was a bit tricky. This is the kitchen window of my old cabin.
Remember what i said a few posts ago about how weird these things are? Exhibit B. Consequently, if you stand next to their feed trough, these guys will come pose for you all evening. Kind of like our dogs, only calmer. 
I'm working on some large pieces for my Crested Butte gallery, in preparation for the coming winter season. This is day two on this piece...my biggest canvas yet. Look for the completed piece on http://zthurmondfineart.com in a few days.
