Between Houses, Viens

Light and shadows, hollyhocks, and a view to blue hills from the high walls of a fortified hill town.

Looking into the Valley

The lavender is just coming into its peak color now, and combines with wheat fields, vineyards and hedgerows to make a landscape like a brightly patterned quilt thrown over rolling hills to the base of the blue Luberon mountains.

Mas and Field, Murs

A farmhouse by the bend in the road by the town park on a hot morning.

Fields Behind Les Bassac

That "golden hour" nineteenth century light that landscape painters love so much.

Market at L'Isle Sur La Sorgue

This Sunday market is famous around the world for its antiques, but when I'm here I always find myself sitting on a bench, looking across the river Sorgue at the shapes and colors on the back side of the vendor's stalls.

Sunday Sketchbook: In Transit

Somewhere over the Atlantic, flying from Montreal to Marseilles for two weeks of painting and teaching in Provence.

Water, Spring

We don't have the ocean in Vermont, but we have all other kinds of water, and most everyone has a pond (either man or beaver-made) nearby. This one is a work of art created by my friends Martin and Laura, with a half-Japanese, half New England inspiration.

Water, Summer

Like most people, I love any form water takes in nature. But brooks are my favorite--hearing them rush by, crouching on a rock to look closely beneath the changing surface.The bank's random arrangement of sticks, plants, rich humus and stone seems like perfection. I'm always happy next to a brook.

Sunday Sketchbook: Provence

I leave Friday for two weeks teaching and painting in Provence, and am looking forward to posting a sketch next Sunday from the great market at L'Isle sur la Sorgue. Here are my ubiquitous feet relaxing a few years ago in my bedroom at Les Bassac, the hamlet that's home to the wonderful workshop site "Arts in Provence".

Mountain, Summer

Looking down from Mt. Mansfield, the highest peak in Vermont: a vantage point that transforms our comfortable and familiar landscape into a place both grand and alien.

The Blue City

I'm back working in my studio on my Vermont landscape series, but before I return to posting those New England compositions again, here's one more plein air painting from my trip to India. I was using the ramparts of an ancient fort as my easel, and looking over towards the "Blue City" of Jodphur. The man walking in the foreground towards me appeared at the last minute, and his addition in the composition gave some sense of scale to this vast, empty valley.

Jain Temple, Ranakpur

For the last week I've been away from my blogging post, working on sketches for a large painting installation for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (a new project I'll be telling you about in upcoming postings.)

Here's a painting from my trip to India a few years ago. I was in many rural areas there that are without electricity, and still waiting for their own New Deal answer for rural electrification--though their solutions will hopefully be based on solar or biomass, rather than coal.

Warehouse, Bradford, VT

On Saturday I enjoyed a day out of my studio and away from the garden. A friend had organized an all day train excursion for a group of painters, and we traveled between the old railroad towns of White River Junction and Bradford, VT. It was one of those old trains that have a few cars, windows that open, and a maximum speed of twenty miles per hour. The company, food on board, and the weather were all lovely. When we arrived, my french easel and I were drawn like a magnet to the homely part of town, and this orange sign, blue litter and rusty chair.

Mountain, Autumn (in process)

Mountain as a constant backdrop, though one of changeable colors and values.

Forest, Summer (in process)

Whether it's a receding road or a footpath leading to a patch of light, I like that sense of being invited forward into an unknown place.

Sunday Sketchbook: Vermont

To quote from my other blog that chronicles my travel adventures around my home state:
"Last week I found myself one warm, sunny morning driving across the southern border of Vermont, thinking about how my nineteen year old son would soon be walking across the same state line with a sixty pound pack on his back." Click here for the rest of the story!

Forest, Spring (in process)

For a few weeks in early spring, sugarbushes (maple woods) are busy places, with tree after tree either festooned the old-fashioned way with metal buckets hanging from hammered spigots, or beribboned in the modern style by lines of hosing running to collecting barrels. Either way the precious sap will be carefully collected, trucked in a pickup down a muddy back road, and boiled for hours by closely watching families in many a small, steamy sugarhouse.

Town, Summer (in process)

Where's there's a town in Vermont, there's a river. Montpelier's waterway no longer is used for industrial energy or transportation, but the Winooski is still, as a thing of beauty, a vital part of the town's economy, and provides (like rivers that run through cities everywhere) the lifeblood of this place.

Memorial Day Sketchbook

Here's one in memory of my father Sammie Abbott: artist, World War 2 veteran (and "pre-mature anti-fascist"), builder of stone walls, organizer pamphleteer extraordinaire, and ceaseless scourge of city planners. Back in the 1970's I drew this of my dad lecturing three unfortunate Highway Department bureaucrats on why the North Central Freeway (ten lanes of traffic that was to run from the Maryland suburbs through the heart of the nation's capital and under the Lincoln Memorial) should not be built. It wasn't--one of the few urban freeways defeated during the destructive era of "urban renewal". To peace-loving fighters everywhere, thank you.

Town, Spring (in process)

Sitting in the sun in Bristol on the first warm morning.

Town, Autumn (in process)

I like backstreets that slope down to water (rivers that once were a town's economic life blood and energy, but now run beside quiet places that welcome the solitary.)

To see the watercolor study for this painting click here.

Sunday Sketchbook: Vermont

This week I attended a conference sponsored by the Council on the Future of Vermont. They've spent a year traveling the state, asking Vermonters to describe their hopes, worries and dreams for Vermont.

All of the artists in the "Art of Action" project were asked to attend, as we have based our work (including my "Elements of Place" paintings that you've been seeing here on this blog as they develop) on the work of the Council.



The report unveiled at the conference echoed my own hopes and fears for my adopted home state: how can we protect our small towns and farms from global economic pressures? Create the jobs that will keep our kids here? Against all odds, keep this place the dirt road, country store, cider and beer-swilling, hard-working, radical, conservative, tolerant, hayfield/cowbarn/garden-crazy place we love?


No one in the conference room had those answers, but sometimes just asking big questions is the most important step forward into the future.

Water, Winter (in process)

Ice fishing on Woodbury Pond. (With typical New England reticence, bodies of water that would be a lake anywhere else are reduced to nominal pond size here in Vermont.)

Water, Autumn (in process)

From a September afternoon in the Champlain Islands, a magical little swamp of reflected colors and shapes.

Mountain, Spring (in process)

Kate's farm and maple tree in the season with the most gentle, subtle color (after the whites retreat and before the greens completely claim the field.)

Sunday Sketchbook: Paris

An artist mother's perspective on Mother's day, from a sketchbook I kept on a trip to Paris with my son when he was five:

Colin has walked long distances without too much complaining, stood on street corners while I've tried to decipher the map, and endured alien foot-long hotdogs on french bread.

Still today was a day for me to imagine with some longing and irritation how great it would be traveling alone in Paris, walking long distances, just looking and not telling stories to amuse a child, and able to pull out my sketchbook in a cafe when I wanted to draw and drink coffee undisturbed.

So instead of enjoying the afternoon we quarreled and reacted to each other's bad mood. Colin surprised me tonight by saying I was mad at him all day, why was that? And that if I had only let him "catch the black fish in the river with my bare hands" we never would have argued.

He's right, I should have let him get wet in the Seine and chase ducks on the quay--and not played the foolish game of "what if" instead of being thankful for what I have.

Mountain, Summer (in process)

The first stage of another view from a mountain top (this time in Stowe) in the season of taffeta blues and velvet greens.

Mountain, Winter (in process)

Looking down from the top of Spruce Mountain.

Mountain (in process)

I'm beginning the "Mountain" series today, with drawings on toned panels for "Spring" and "Winter" images.

Farm, Spring

We're having lovely mornings like these now with a newly-warm sun and hazy yellowed light. On a smaller gardener's scale I'm doing the same May morning work of planting and mulching (playing hookey from my studio every now and then is a necessary guilty pleasure if I'm going to be picking tomatoes this August.)