I started the painting that I've been calling Above It All on location and added the figure when I completed it in my studio. I came across it as I was scrolling through my paintings and added it to the Valentine's Collection I've put together with special pricing for the month of February.

 I thought about changing the title to more closely express my feelings about the scene. Maybe it would be more accurate to call it All's Right With the World because when I sit on those very rocks at Manor Park in Larchmont, NY, that's how I always feel. That's even when I've come there in the midst of crisis or unhappiness. Perched on Mother Earth, looking out at that tranquil scene, whatever is burdening me drops away for the time being and I'm filled with peace. If you think that solitary figure looks lonely, it's not the way I felt about adding her to the scene. Alone with Nature is very different from feeling lonely.

Nature can have the ability if you tune into it, or let it tune into you, to reach into your very soul. Maybe it's realizing how large it is, and how small we humans are, that I find puts everything in a different perspective.

Here's a new, 12"x24" studio painting, Summer Day, Garrison on Hudson, which I chose to paint in the long, horizontal format I've been loving. It bounces off information gleaned from an earlier,  9"x12" painting begun en plein air. I could see it becoming even more exciting by painting it still larger. Lately, I've been feeling the urge to move to a larger studio where larger works would be easier to accomplish.

The narrow format works so well with certain scenes, especially those at the beach or waterfront. It allows the eye to expand outward and into the distance, as it does when you are at such a location, and to be less involved with the foreground close to where you are standing.

Ripples at Garrison, the 9"x12" painting that inspired me to paint this one, can be found in the Paintings Section of this website in the Hudson Valley Collection. Take a look and see how different the same scene can look with a different emphasis.

Until last week, I had managed to avoid outdoor painting from the first really chilly days in autumn until it started to warm up in April. I would venture outdoors for a walk and photo shoot on a pleasant afternoon, especially after a snowstorm but then would scurry back to my cozy studio and paint indoors.

I attribute my new courage to try outdoor winter painting to becoming a member of Artists in the Parks and being informed that one of their events each year would be a silent auction art show held under a tent in the middle of the Knickerbocker Ice Festival at Rockland Lake in Congers, NY. One of the requirements for being in the show was that one work must be painted on location at the lake on the first day of the event. Today was the day.

Very luckily, today was a sunny, calm day around 36-40 degrees--colder, when I first arrived. Not daring to make my very first attempt on the day of the event, I decided two weeks ago that the next slightly warm day I could get there, I would head up to the lake and see how I fared. Last week after bundling up in many layers, I met an artist friend at the lake and we worked on a painting. I lasted about 2 hours on location before I was chilled through. That painting is shown in my New Works Collection and is called Cold, Crisp Day.

Today, I figured out some warmer head gear and had both fingerless rag gloves and insulated gloves so I could always have something on my hands as I set up and worked. I added more warmth to my legs but now have learned that I really need heavy ski pants with long underwear underneath to stay warm for hours. Luckily, it was a bit warmer today and, especially because I knew I had to completely finish, I kept going for about 3 or more hours before quitting. I loved the scene I chose to paint (Rocky Shoreline at Rockland Lake) and see that there are wonderful subdued colors in the winter landscape.

I'll be back for more now that I've "broken the ice."

I have been enjoying experimenting with new formats from paintings I've already done by cropping square images in Photoshop from some of my larger, rectangular paintings. I can get an idea of whether a portion of the painting would work anew as an entirely different painting in a square shape. I decided to work in acrylic on paper for these "Tiny Squares" and matting them very attractively in a wide, square mat with a black core. The black core frames the painting with a fine black line and then expands out to the cream colored mat. I've been trying 4", 5", and 6" squares.

There's something about a tiny size that is highlighted with a wide expanse of mat (e.g. a 5"x5" or 6"x6" in a 12"x12" mat), that is both dramatic and charming. It throws me back to my fascination as a child with miniature furniture and food items for dollhouses.

My original reason for trying these tiny paintings was to be able to offer some less expensive work to the viewers at fund-raisers and holiday shows that I enter during the Winter months. Artists are offered the possibility of showing framed and unframed work. These pieces are matted but not framed.

I've decided to post them on my website as well as showing them at local shows. I'll keep them in a new Collection and call them Tiny Squares.

What I've found from doing these small paintings is that I now want to try some of the new squares as larger squares in oil on canvas or panel to see what they look like as big paintings. I definitely have my work cut out for me.

It's always particularly gratifying to have someone feel strongly attracted to a painting that I painted because of my strong attraction to the subject. That's the case with the painting I call Windswept Sky, a small oil study I painted based on a sky that I photographed one blustery winter evening as the sun was going down and as the weather was clearing.

I do a lot of looking up at the sky since I started painting landscapes. I especially love early evening skies with lots of clouds that are sometimes the harbinger of coming bad weather and sometimes the last signs of stormy weather moving out. When it's possible, I grab my camera and head over to the Hudson, which is the nearest open expanse in my area and where I can really get a good view of land, water and sky at the same time.

In this painting, it was great fun and quite a challenge to try capturing the light behind the clouds and the particular broken formation of the clouds that day.

My romance with marshes continues on with this, my latest painting from the Iona Island Marsh. I thought my readers might find it interesting to compare this marsh painting, Bear Mt. Bridge from Iona Marsh, with the painting called Fall Morning at the Marsh in my previous blog post on 9/29.

 I painted both of the paintings from the same side of the narrow road that leads onto the island and was standing about 6 feet away from where I stood the first time. The scenes are very different because I focussed on one area one day and turned about a quarter turn to focus on an entirely different scene the next time.

As you can see from the difference in colors between the two scenes, a change of weather and conditions can create a very different atmosphere and that can lead me to choose a different subject. When painting Fall Morning at the Marsh, it was the beautifully bright colors of the very sunny, clear day and the wonderful blue of the sky reflected in the water that caught my eye.

This time, I was especially attracted to the beautiful clouds in the sky. They started out looking very white and billowy. As I painted, the clouds changed shape and took on more and more color and became even more interesting. This was a time that I chased the changing weather pattern as it was occurring because I liked the new look even better. The exposed mud and low tide, the colorful tassels on the tall grasses and the variety of colors in the trees and grasses were also qualities I found alluring.

This year, I hope to go back to the marsh after a snow storm and see what there is to see on a winter day.

I've been visiting this marshy area at Iona Island near the Bear Mountain Bridge for several years now and keep being drawn back. There are many interesting views to paint and I never know which will call to me on any given day. This painting was painted en plein air for the Artists in the Parks paint-out event at Bear Mountain on a beautiful day in September.

What makes a particular area especially alluring? Every artist will give you a different answer to that question.  In the case of marshes, I'm drawn to a combination of qualities. There's always a mix of subtle earth colors to be found in the marsh grasses, reeds, and mud. Then there are the cooler colors of water and sky. Because of the moisture present throughout the marsh, warm colors are often muted and water and sky will often have traces of warm tones in the clouds and atmosphere.

There are also many textural elements present. I love expressing texture with dancing brush strokes that vary with each different area depicted. The textures are then balanced by the smoother areas of sky and water. For me, this creates an ideal blend.

There are several scenes in the Hudson Highlands that I come back to again and again to paint. One is the view of Constitution Marsh along the Hudson as seen from the rear of the property at the Boscobel Restoration in Garrison, NY. The painting pictured here and called Clouds Over Constitution Marsh, a 12"x16" oil on panel just sold over the past weekend at a benefit to support the Hudson Valley Hospital in Peekskill.

The enormous panoramic view that stretches into the distance is both breath-taking and daunting and my first few tries at capturing what I was seeing were less than successful to say the least. I started with small panels as I often do on location and tried to capture that big scene. It didn't work.

My next few attempts were more successful. I chose a  vertical format and peaked through an area with trees in the foreground and just a little of the scene
showing through.

When I came back in the Spring of 2008, I found my courage increasing and I decided to tackle larger formats from then on that would enable me to do greater justice to the intricate array of marsh, water, receding mountains and sky. The

I've started to feel that I'm getting the hang of this scene and certainly won't get bored with it. Every time I visit it, the atmosphere, the sky and lighting, and the water levels in the marsh are different. Then, add to that, with each season, the colors are different. Then each year, the weather patterns create differences in the foliage.

As you can see, there will be more challenges and more Boscobel views to come.

I've been creating tweets and posting them on Twitter for the past 6 or so months. At first it was out of curiosity and reading that it was a wise marketing move, then, because I actually found writing a very short note about something I'm doing or that I'd like to talk about challenging and fun. Today, I had an unexpected outcome from my Twittering that made me see how social media sites can spread the word about me in interesting ways.

First, I started to follow people and organizations which I like and they, in turn, often linked ("followed" in Twitterspeak) to me. As a result, I made contact with a writer for the Journal News, the largest newspaper in my county, who was planning to write an article about local Twitterers. She interviewed me over the phone and then arranged to have a photographer meet me when I was out painting along the Hudson in Croton. Today, in the Journal News Sunday edition, there was the article and there was a picture of me   working at establishing the guidelines for my painting. The article included a paragraph or two about me and why I Twitter. Having learned to take one piece of publicity and use it again, I've Twittered about the article, talked about it on Facebook and am writing about it here.

If you'd like to see the article, here's the link to the online version on LoHud.com :  http://bit.ly/b81Z4

I am always so appreciative of conservation group's attempts to bring back and create new opportunities for people to access beautiful locations and enjoy them. I live in the Lower Hudson Valley not very far North of New York City. The area is very built up and often, the most beautiful views are lost to all but a few because they are on private land.

I find it wonderful to see the renewed efforts to reclaim portions of the land that were once privately owned and then, sometimes, abandoned and allowed to become eyesores or inaccessible to the public. Scenic Hudson has been slowly bringing back neglected areas along the Hudson and re-opening them for public use.

I painted this painting of the NewBurgh/Beacon Bridge and an old yacht club along the Hudson from this wonderful, new park called Long Dock Park in Beacon. A peer for fishing and viewing was built with funding. Paths and a parking area were created. The place has come alive with people enjoying nature.

While I and a friend painted on the June morning I was there, there were fishermen fishing, lovers sitting on the rocks and gazing at the water, families with children in strollers  and a couple of older couples walking the paths.

I believe that each time an area is preserved and people are able to drink in the beauty that is nature, we take another step toward awakening all of us to the need to nurture and save this wonderful planet. I continue to hope that it's not too late and too little to do that.