Plein Air Drawings

The Messner Barn is a huge, beautifully proportioned structure viewable only from the Keweenaw Waterway. This is the only en plein aire sketch that I have ever done from my kayak. As the wind came up, my little improvised anchor just barely held me in place to finish the sketch.

Il Duomo Cathedral in Milano is uniquely all white marble, including the roof. I was able to sit in a niche off from the roof tour walkway and sketch, pondering the skill of the stone masons who built this important Italian monument.

Pictograph Cave State Park near Billings, Montana has several caves with Native American pictographs up to 2,100 years old. The spherical concretions in and around Ghost Cave are very unique.

Jill and I stayed in the marvelous historic Old Faithful Inn when we visited Yellowstone National Park. It was fun sketching the huge beautiful lodge, with the Old Faithful Geyser regularly erupting only a couple of hundred feet away.

The cast iron and glass vaulted Galleria is Italy’s oldest covered shopping mall. It is a wonderful people space. I managed to sit against a wall, just out of the crush of people, to sketch this dramatic one point perspective.

The iron ore loading dock in downtown Marquette, Michigan is one of my favorite UP mining ruins. It is very handsome and cathedral-like, even though the towering structure was purely functional. The din of the ore being gravity fed, from train cars, down metal chutes into the huge ore boats must have been deafening.

The Laurium Manor Inn is one of the Keweenaw Peninsula’s finest places to stay. The main house is beautiful, and the Victorian Hall and Carriage House are also very handsome examples of the copper mining boomtown era.

This is my favorite restaurant in Old Koln, Germany. The saurbraten, elk, deer and other traditional dishes are excellent. The cuisine and interior ambiance are historically authentic, even though the building was probably completely re-built after the allied bombing in WW2.

I thought about my ancestors while sketching the Ellis Island main building. It was here that my Dutch paternal grandfather Cornelius Nieuwenhuize became Casey Newhouse, soon after the turn of the 20th century.

The partially sunken dredge is a Keweenaw landmark. Jill and I really enjoyed kayaking around it and right into it, through a huge hole in the side at the water line. Once inside it is very disorienting, as the large rectangular space is angled about 30 degrees.