I found this group of Ptarmigan on Snoqualmie Mountain about 50 miles east of Seattle in October 2008 and painted both the landscape and the birds from photos I took of them. It was one of the last three paintings I did, back in March 2015, before my hands became too weak to use a paintbrush. Some people suggested that I could keep painting by holding the paintbrush in my mouth, but as far as I know, those people never actually tried it. Drooling is a problem with that approach.
Like most of my paintings, it is not without flaws. The way I drew the birds is the big problem. I never did learn to draw, a deficiency which largely thwarted my ambition to paint birds. You can get the outline of a mountain wrong and nobody will notice but the shape of a bird, or a person's face, has to be right. The other problem area is the composition, which I prefer in the 5x7 study. In the larger painting I made the birds too small.

Because I didn't do many paintings, I had to make the few I did count. I considered doing a whole series of Rainier paintings but after starting with this view of the mountain, one of my favorites, I ran out of time to do any more. The original photo expresses more of the mountain's presence than the 5x7 study, which in turn does better at that than the final painting. I took the photo on a hike with John M and included him in the painting, thus making it a portrait of sorts - my first since I did a self-portrait back in 1976 when I didn't know any better.

This is my favorite view in Jackson, the town where I grew up, and the photograph captures it during my favorite time of year, when the progression of spring has produced brought forth foliage and flowers in the valleys but not yet on the higher slopes of the mountains. I did an acrylic painting of the same scene in March 2012 and wondered if I could do it better with oils.
I started with an underpainting using an oil wash the way I learned in my oil painting class in college, an approach I eschewed for most of my subsequent paintings. For those I would start in the upper left corner and lay down the finished work from left to right and top to bottom. The problem with doing a underpainting was that sometimes I never returned to finish it. This time I did and the result is one of my best paintings.

Mount Washington, the highest mountain in the northeastern US, anchored the view out my bedroom window as a boy. I hiked to the summit for the first time two days after my seventh birthday and many times since. I photographed this view from six miles away at the top of the Wildcat Mountain Ski Area on my last hike up Wildcat in February 2015. The 5x7 study is a more faithful depiction of the scene and for a long time I was disappointed that I had inadvertently exaggerated the elevation of the mountain in the larger painting in order to accommodate the 3x4 format (the original photo was 2x3), but now I prefer the larger work. It more accurately conveys the feeling of that view.

I started this painting to commemorate my mother's last hike in the Alpine Garden on Mount Washington, so named for the profusion of flowers which bloom there in June. I had intended to feature flowers of Diapensia and Lapland Rosebay between the rocks in the foreground but after struggling to get the rocks right, I put off doing the flowers and never came back to them. I gave the unfinished painting to her anyhow and she claimed she enjoyed it even without the flowers, but it would have been much better with them.

I started this painting in the sunny doorway of our room at the Klondike Motel in Republic during my trip across north-central Washington with David in mid-March 2014 and finished it from a photo three weeks later. It is one of Darchelle's favorites.

I started this painting en plein air, standing with my easel and paints on a damp December afternoon at the overlook across from the falls. The middle image above is my initial result; the image on the right shows the finished painting. The painting suffers from my failure to accurately observe the shape of the waterfall; The water doesn't, as it turns out, just fall but also continues its forward motion as it does so. I fell into the trap of painting what I knew, or thought I knew, rather than what I actually saw.

During the time I worked on this painting, sitting in my car out on Grayland beach on a cloudy afternoon, the sky cleared and the light and color of the landscape completely changed. I tried to paint the way it looked in the middle of the change and was reasonably pleased with the result.

That I did this sketch on paper rather than canvasboard suggests that it was my first attempt at a painting after I decided to switch back to using oils. I painted it en plein air at Flaming Geyser Park near Enumclaw on a busy Saturday afternoon but as always, left out the people.

Half a dozen Snowy Owls spent the winter of 2012 on Damon Point in Ocean Shores, inspiring me to try a painting. It was my most ambitious acrylic, and I think also the last last one I did before switching back to oils. I started it in March 2012 and finished it two weeks later after several significant revisions. The owls are not quite right somehow but I could never figure out how to fix them, so it isn't my favorite piece though I appreciate the memories of those owls which the painting evokes.

This view east over Pelton Basin from Cascade Pass is one of my favorite scenes in the North Cascades and was one of the first subjects I attempted when I resumed painting in 2010 or 2011. I based the painting on a photo I took on the last day of a three-day backpacking trip with David in August 2009, my first visit to that spectacular area. I completed the painting on the same day in March 2012 that I started the Snowy Owls. Looking back, I wish that I had persisted a little longer with acrylics; this painting has a freshness and a painterly style which my subsequent oils generally lack.

This painting was commissioned by our elderly Adventist friend Hazel L, probably because she suspected that I needed a little financial assistance in view of my upcoming wedding and marriage to Susan. As I recall, Hazel paid for much of our honeymoon as well, the first weekend of which we spent with her and her husband at the Oklahoma property of a friend of theirs. It was the last oil painting I would do until after I retired from my career as a computer programmer more than 25 years later. After Hazel's husband died and upon her move to southern California to live with her daughter, she returned the painting to us. I love the landscape (despite the excessive elevation of the mountain) but the gimpy fourth swan, although faithful to the photograph, has always bothered me.

I intended this large painting to be the culmination of my efforts to portray the combination of whitewater, mountains and clouds typical of scenes we saw while kayaking the rivers of western Washington. The river is based on the entrance to the rapid called "Boulder Drop" on the Skykomish near Index. The forest is based on old-growth in the Stillaguamish Valley along the Mountain Loop Highway above Silverton and the montains are inspired by peaks in the same area. I spent more than 100 hours on the painting and it was my final attempt on the subject. Probably not my best though.

I got bogged down in the foreground grasses in this painting and lacked the courage, if not the skill, to finish the bird and the post it was sitting on. Too bad.

Loking back on it, I wonder why I was too intimidated by this subject to continue with this painting once I had done the initial color wash. Perhaps the finished work would not have been as good as I imagine.

This is my only photo of this painting, which was commissioned by the mother of my then-girlfriend Jennie after we all ran Westwater Canyon on the Green River together. The photo doesn't do the painting justice. I think I recall hearing that unlike me, the purchaser wasn't completely happy with it; I wish I'd offered then and there to buy it back at a premium. Maybe I did, and she decided to keep it. Maybe by now she has died, and my ex-girlfriend has inherited. But now I'm rambling.

When I first moved to Washington I was intrigued by Barrow's Goldeneyes. This painting, which I did as an entry to a local competition, gave me the opportunity to fulfill that interest. I painted it, and even traced the outlines of the birds, from slides I took at the Ballard Locks in Seattle. I thought the painting turned out pretty well; unfortunately the judges of the competition did not agree.

I painted this landscape mostly en plein air from above the Skykomish River upstream of the railroad bridge takeout for the kayak run which included Boulder Drop. I made several trips out to my vantage point, each time walking across the railroad bridge. There weren't many trains on that track; just the same I must have had an exit strategy in mind in case I'd heard a train coming. I don't remember what it was because I never had to use it. The painting has a freshness that my studio works lacked but I was never happy with the rocks and water, perhaps because I tried to paint them from a slide.

I painted this painting in the winter and spring of 1981 in between kayaking trips. The bird is a Prairie Falcon and the landscape is the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs CO. Prairie Falcons (though not this individual, which is a semi-tame falconer's bird) nested in the gray crag in the background that spring and one of them actually perched briefly in the small pine at the lower left of the painting while I was sitting quietly on the ridge working on the rocks under the bird. Those rocks gave me a lot of trouble; I repainted them at least twice. I had a hard time with the sky too, but the bird and the landscape went pretty easily. Perhaps if painting had not been so difficult, I might have become an artist instead of a programmer. I liked how the painting turned out despite its flaws, and am grateful for memories of watching the Prairie Falcons chasing pigeons around the crags at Garden of the Gods while I was out there working on it.