I think we’ve all known special places that have deep
meaning for us personally.
Maybe we don’t always recognize it at the time. There are several natural places that are
special to me, but those with the deepest roots are woven from my childhood
memories. Colors and shapes, smells and sounds,
and textures like the tactile velvet of new buds or flaking limestone.
The memories stay vivid and strong – some more so, some
less. Most of them comforting, but some,
not so much. They speak of my
relationships with nature. They are both
known and unknown, some barely lurking within my subconscious. What I remember most are not the events, but
the feelings those connections gave me.
Maple leaves, owl feather, hickory nuts, and wild grape.
This is a small nature sketch done years ago, somewhere in
the mid-1980s, of things collected on a walk through Iowa woods. It was mid-autumn, and the season gave me
treasures and a near infinity of browns and buff, with splashes of red and
yellow. Along the trail: leaves on limb
and ground, sticks and branches and trunks and bark, seeds and frost-bitten
fruits, empty acorn caps and sometimes a glimpse of gritty green.
The woods I rambled in are located in upper northeast Iowa,
along a limestone ridge and bluff above a river. It is
a place of meditation, of quietness threaded with birdsong. This is also a connection to a point in time. Fall is a favorite season of mine; it feels
like an important transition somehow, and I sometimes catch my breath waiting
for the next thing to come.
It feels like a time to let life unwind, and a place to rest
and heal.
A sacred place.
Media:
Paper - unknown mass-produced watercolor paper pad
Watercolor paint, probably Grumbacher and/or Winsor &
Newton
(the colors still
surprisingly bright after almost 40 years)
Craft brushes
# 2 Pencil
