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This was a commission done in both graphite & watercolor.Watercolor was used only for the color in the leaves. The only other color is in the 2 rocks in the foreground & the Mountains in the back. For them, I used graphitint pencils which have only a hint of color. I used a color called "storm" to depict the maroon nature of the rock in the area.
I was so excited to do THESE mountains, THESE MAROON BELLS�these are some of my favorites. I have hiked here with friends & with family. I've stood in the pitch black with over 100 strangers waiting in freezing weather, tripods & cameras at the ready to capture that dazzling, breathtaking moment when the rising sun first kisses the peaks. I have rested beneath their shadows, wandered in their aspen groves and stood in amazed wonder at their reflection in the 2 lakes they use to admire themselves all day long. Since I first saw them in 1973, I have been in love. This rendering shows them as they were back then as this view is har...

Parts of my story are integral to why I do what I do, what motivates me and the emotions and ideas I am trying to convey through my work. CS Lewis said, in Till We Have Faces... The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing, to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from, my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing...The longing for home...For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back. My mother told people the first thing I ever drew was a horse before I was three in the dust on the kitchen floor of the little white clapboard parsonage in the North Woods of Wisconsin. In 1963, our family took a trip Out West to Vancouver, BC,...