“…I was born to be lonely, I am best so!”

The poem Danse Russe by William Carlos Williams was with me as I sat alone in the studio, enjoying the silence.  As a creative person I often crave solitude, and even the complicated and conflicted moments of loneliness that solitude brings with it.  That is the emotional space I look for when I paint.  In this sparsely populated country you don’t have to wander far to find yourself completely alone in the world, physically anyway.  Not a person, not a car, at least for as far as the eye can see.  Here is the view from a lovely quiet hillside, in a valley protected from the wind, on an unusually clear and sunny day.

I did a few  paintings over the last three days, around 10″x12″ or 9″x9″ in that range.  I painted the one below from that quiet hillside.  It was a rare treat to sit comfortably outside and paint for a couple of hours, instead of inside the car.

This is a studio painting:And here, my biggest painting yet, ever.  Really.  It was one of my goals of this residency to push my work to a larger format. It’s about 16″ x 14″, so this is progress.  I’m still tweaking it here and there, but this is what it looks like right now: