images from upstate

A week upstate amid thunderstorms, greenery and discovering wasps and a toad living in the car. I convince my son to sit for me and I paint like crazy to make this:




Where usually August is dry and plants are yellowing, this year the rain beat itself against the earth. The garden got ideas of its own and I just let it:

extreme memory

These are the fall colors of upstate New York--the halogen like illuminations of tree leaves framed and scribble over with the black trunks and branches of their fellows...often it is the contrasts of darks and extreme color that entrance me.
And here is my studio, stroked with the late sun, and guarded by the hydrangea's pinked blooms. To me the studio is a place of magic--its structure a host to possibilities and strange instructions. This one has a trapeze and many books, not to mention a ten foot high wall to paint on.
I've been reading Krakauer's Into the Wild. It was pressed on me by a friend, otherwise I probably would have ignored it, thinking it somewhere in the geography of Herzog's Grizzly Man. But it isn't.
I am reminded of a very young self ending up in a hospital in the Sahara in Algeria. Not enough salt--it can kill you. I was lucky--I only ran a 104 degree temperature for several days.
This was before the circus. And before martial arts.
I am reminded of that heedless drive and recklessness. A part of me misses it. The Mom part of me cringes at the thought of my son stepping into it, and yet I would be sad if he never spent time there.
So---I plunge the world into my eyes and drink deep...