"Mountain Pond at Dawn" is about the calming qualities of a landscape: the way the light can lull you into reverie, or the way the air can smell of the past and take you back. Oil on Panel 24 x 24 Framed and ready for hanging.

When I was young we traveled between Wichita and Manhattan Kansas on a regular basis to visit family. There are several ways to make this trip but my favorite is up highway 77 through Chase county. Chase was made relatively famous in William Least Heat Moon's "Deep Map" Prairie Erth, and like he claimed, it's a piece of "old" America. There is a part of the trip where the road curves with a lime stone wall accent and a traintrack looms overhead. The limestone wall shields an old farm and in the distance you could see the old farmhouse and it was like a step back in time. I believe that it was this scene and a few others like it that made me want to be an artist. There was a beauty to the scene, but a story to be told as well. I finally got around to painting that exact scene, which I've posted here.

A few weeks ago I was traveling back from a gallery opening in Kansas City and detoured into Chase county for inspiration, picture taking and sketching. I found that the bend in the road has been greatly modified: the old trees replaced with equally-spaced sapplings, limestone wall mended, a new driveway that leads to an imposing mansion deep in the field. Old America gentrified. A lot of feelings moved over me, but one was pride in having captured some sense of the old scene before it was gone. Artists are a nostalgic lot; it might be because memory has a way of romanticising and in the end for many of us it's the romance that keeps us creating.