Current Work in Progress

The painting looks better now (more glow/white sparkles), but here's a photo from a few days ago. It goes well with a quote from this date in Henry David Thoreau's journal:

"The most valuable communication or news consists of hints and suggestions."
Henry David Thoreau- July 29, 1857

On a grander scale

photo taken in Rocky Mountain National Park this last weekend.

Henry David Thoreau -February 2, 1852:

Sir Francis Head says that in America “the moon looks larger” than in Europe. Here, then, more moonshine is to be expected. Perhaps the sun looks larger also. Such are the advantages of the New World. The same writer says, “the heavens of America appear infinitely higher,” “the stars are brighter.” These, too, are encouraging facts, symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length, perchance, the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the American mind, and the intimations that star it will appear as much brighter. For I believe that climate does thus react on man, and that there is something in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires. We shall be more imaginative; we shall be clearer, as our sky, bluer, fresher; broader and more comprehensive in our understanding, like our plains; our intellect on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and our lakes, and mountains and forests. Are not these advantages? Will not man grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under these influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are in his life?

The Echo of the Place We Are In

City Park, Denver - photo by Lorna Cochrane

Henry David Thoreau - October 30, 1850 (yesterday, 159 years ago)

"I used to strike with a paddle on the side of my boat on Walden Pond, filling the surrounding woods with circling and dilating sound, awaking the woods, “stirring them up,” as a keeper of a menagerie his lions and tigers, a growl from all. All melody is a sweet echo, as it were coincident with [the] movement of our organs. We wake the echo of the place we are in, its lumbering music."

I love that last sentence.

Wildness and the Savage Heart

photo by Nathan Abels - taken in Estes Park, Colorado

From Wallace Stegner's The American West as Living Space;

"Why should I stand up for civilization? Thoreau asked a lecture audience. Any burgher or churchwarden would stand up for that. Thoreau chose instead to stand up for wildness and the savage heart."

Dark as Pitch

photo by Nathan Abels

"There is something worth living for when we are resisted, threatened. As at the last day we might be thrilled with the prospect of the grandeur of our destiny, so in these first days our destiny appears grander. What would the days, what would our life, be worth, if some nights were not dark as pitch, - of darkness tangible or that you can cut with a knife? How else could the light in the mind shine? How should we be conscious of the light of reason? If it were not for physical cold, how should we have discovered the warmth of the affections? I sometimes feel that I need to sit in a far-away cave through a three weeks’ storm, cold and wet, to give a tone to my system."

Henry David Thoreau, March 31, 1852

This Date, from Henry David Thoreau's Journal

This Date, from Henry David Thoreau's Journal:

"How simple is the natural connection of events. We complain greatly of the want of flow and sequence in books, but if the journalist only move himself from Boston to New York and speak as before, there is link enough. And so there would be, if he were as careless of connection and order when he stayed at home, and let the incessant progress which his life makes be the apology for abruptness. Do I not travel as far away from my old resorts, though I stay here at home, as though I were on board the steamboat? Is not my life riveted together? Has not it sequence? Do not my breathings follow each other naturally?"

Thoreau talks about a question that I think a lot of visual artists ask themselves as well - "is my work cohesive?" or "is this new work too much of a diversion from the previous work?" or to put it plainly, "does this all go together?" I often tell my friends (and reassure myself) that the artist is what ties the work together and not the visual sameness or similarity...as Thoreau so well put on this date 167 years ago.