Where is your Very Beautiful Place?

There are some places, that when you go there you can’t be anywhere else. You mind does not wander.
You are here and you are now.

Newton St. Studios News letter October 26, 2020
Hello everybody,

Where is your special place, the place that makes you feel here and now?

I often feel that way about an ocean beach – particularly on the Washington coast where it’s rugged, but the ocean is pretty far from here. But I can get to this place overlooking the Yakima River, near Thorp, in a bit over an hour. I’ve visited it many times in many seasons and it never ceases to evoke a sense of wonder and amazement in me. I am there and being here is good enough, and the time is enough and I am enough and the place is everything.

It helps to have learned something about the geology of the region. I will give a shout out to Nick Zentner (add a dot com and look him up) Because over time he’s taught me via his videos and live field trips (pre-covid) a lot about the story of the region and the immense amount of time it took for the immense movements of rock to shape the landscape: the earth opening to flood the bedrock with layer after layer of basalt blanketing the ground thousands of feet thick, the folding of ridges, the rivers carrying rocks and so much more. Also I will give a shout out, as he also does, to the Roadside Geology Books – there is a whole series but the on Washington is full of cool stuff.

So, standing on this overlook, and knowing something of the eons of time it took to bend the oxbow in the Yakima, I feel small, but strangely not insignificant.

I hope you also have a very beautiful place and I hope that your place, like mine travels with you once you’ve been part of it long enough – less than a wink in geological time, but enough in human time that’s embedded itself into your essential being. I hope you write back and tell me where it is.

We need context in life and these places give us context. We overlap with the space – and - in the overlapping we find we have edges.  We find a definition of the self that is different than the one we get from internal thought and the space our internal thought takes up. We find in such places some external reference points that allow us to crawl out of the confines of the self for long enough, just long enough, that we can gain some perspective.

And so we transition to painting - making images - creating Art. Capital A.

I’ve long been fascinated with pattern, and how disruptions in our learned expectations of a pattern, even if it’s a chaotic or dynamic pattern, allows us to see form.  It’s like how you notice a bird in a tree by finding the outlier that breaks the dynamic pattern of branches; it’s something that looks out of place. We find fish that way as well when we stalk the river fly rod in hand.

Nothing exists in isolation and in the very beautiful place that is grand beyond the expectation of the self I find an outline of my existence that’s not so difficult to live with – for now. I am not so important I have to take myself seriously, but as part of the planet I certainly don’t seem out of place.

The Very Beautiful Place near Throp Washington

I made a painting of this place from winter, it’s small. I’ve done a whole series of landscape paintings of large vistas on small canvases – because the weird thing about vision is when you see something large, you’re pretty far away so the big thing looks small. Looking at say, Mt. Rainer from Seattle we are impressed with the size of the volcano but holding up a thumb we can blot it from our view.

Happy to say I sold the painting on the left to a fellow person who dares to fly-fish-while-while-female.

Still some fun sized stuff on Etsy, you can use the coupon October until the end of the month. Next promotion will be 30% off and not 40% due to the increase in postage.

I went to send some etsy packages out I noticed the cost of sending had gone up to $8.39 for a package weighing 1lb 1oz! See the Huff Post article here – the blame lies on they who must be voted out now. This increase is an actual plot. We are not paranoid. The enemy is not us this time. VOTE.