Plein Air Drawings

The Alabama Hills have hundreds of amazing sculptural rock formations. The Mobius Arch is one of the most interesting. I finished the sketch just before a deluge of rain with 50+ mph winds hit the area.

Jill and I visited the highest altitude ancient Bristlecone Pine stand at 10,000 feet, at the tree line below White Mountain peak. I sketched this beautiful 4,000 to 6,000 year old tree while Jill hiked around the area. For a time we were the only people there. It was sunny and cool with no wind. Unforgettable!

On the remote western slope of Mammoth Mountain in California, the Devil’s Postpile is a rare and amazing rock formation of hexagonal columnar posts. It is the most architectural geological site that I have ever seen. Nature seldom creates so many straight lines in rock formations.

The silver mining ghost town of Rhyolite, up the eastern mountain slope from the floor of Death Valley, was a very short lived boomtown. Most of the wood buildings have deteriorated, but the stone Cook Bank Building is still partially standing like a sentinel.

The Miwok people of the Sierra Nevada foothills subsisted primarily on acorns. I sketched these reproductions of their bark teepees and acorn storage towers. The towers were very cleverly engineered with natural materials to keep the critters out.

In the Andrew Wyeth painting “Christina’s World”, the Olson house can be seen at the top of the hill in the distance. The house is now an interpretive museum of Wyeth’s work, the history of the Olson family and the Cushing, Maine region.

Alden Dow’s residence and studio in Midland, Michigan is a masterpiece of contemporary 20th century architecture, on par with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesen East and Taliesen West. Jill and I have visited there several times for different Midland architectural events.

Frank Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion band shell, in Chicago’s Millennium Park, is an exuberant focal point for a wonderful outdoor performance space. I enjoyed sketching the wild flowing shapes sculpted in stainless steel.

I sketched the Quincy smelter ruins from the top of a slag pile directly across the railroad tracks, soon after construction began on saving the historic site from demolition. Some of Jill’s Keweenaw Peninsula family members were involved in the copper mining industry.

My favorite tree in the Tahoe area is near the Lake Tahoe shore on the way to Emerald Bay. I sketched in a steeply reclined position so that I could capture the soaring height and incredible girth of the double trunk ancient cedar, which has survived untold numbers of forest fires.