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Last Wednesday David and I left the house at 5am to be at the Merced Wildlife Refuge before sunrise.  Our agenda was to meet up with Michael Frye , Claudia Welsh and their friend Kirk Keeler at sunrise,  Dan Mitchell would join us late afternoon.  The MWR is a driving tour with a couple of viewing platforms where […]

Not only are the birds interesting, fascinating and a challenge to photograph, there are wonderful compositions of the the landscape with which to play.  I’m always searching for painting references.  The golden afternoon light was lighting the tops of the cattails.  The distant plants had lovely texture and color.  The sky color lying on the […]

We took a last minute Saturday drive down to the Merced Wildlife Refuge to meet up with  G. Dan Mitchell and his lovely wife Patty.  The deck thermometer was reading low 50’s but the car read 57 degrees as we pulled out of the driveway at 2pm.  After a short stop in Merced for a […]

Yesterday morning Teri Robinson invited us to photograph a new road he’s been exploring.  David had too much work to do but I said I’d be delighted.  We left on our adventure at 11am. The road we took was north of us, up highway 49 towards Mariposa.  It’s a typical foothill road that drops in […]

One of the artists I admire is M. Katherine Hurley.  She is a wonderful colorist.  A couple days ago I decided to follow along with her CD demo “Dramatic Values, Works in Black and White’.  I then chose a photograph of my own to work with.  My photograph is from an overcast day at the […]

  Part Two – Noon to Sunset After our visit to Tree Falls, I have no idea if that’s a proper name for that landmark, we went to Olmstead Point to take a look.  Since it was the middle of the day it wasn’t very inspiring so we decided to eat lunch elsewhere and return […]

  Part One, First Half of the Day We saw so many interesting possibilities on Saturday that we decided to return Tuesday.  We were captivated with the frozen Dana branch of the Tuolumne River so that was our first destination.  I was fascinated with how the river froze in the form of flowing water, as […]

David and I decided to take advantage of the Glacier Point Road being open this late in the season to photograph the sunrise with Half Dome.  I’d recently posted to Google+ a collage I’d made with David’s cast off photographs and trial prints of my giclees.  A fellow photographer on Google+, Vincent Goetz, offered his cast […]

I painted within the landscape of my life today….outside, en plein air.  I painted a layer of sealant on our recently constructed platform deck.  I started this project a year ago when I put the concrete piers in place for the first section and laid the unsecured boards in place.  There were several times over the […]

 Sierra Art Trails sponsored a 2 day silk screening workshop last week.  Sierra Art Trails’ current special exhibit, ‘Our Wild Lands’, included a beautiful serigraph by Alan Works, the instructor of the silk screening class.  I’m not sure if ‘silk screen’ should be one word or two, I’ve seen it written both ways.  The class […]