Shown here are 11 of the 18 paintings done on the October tour. All are oil on panel. Actual size for most panels is approximately 6" x 9". The following rough narrative gives plenty of context for anyone interested:

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KINGSTON, NY

First stop was near Kingston, NY. My hosts were Larry Silver and Lynn Woods. Lynn, an artist and arts writer, had happened upon my website and encouraged me to visit. Through some last minute reshuffling, I ended up going to Larry's house, located on a rural route well outside Kingston, between NY City's Ashokan Reservoir and the Shawangunk Mountains.

I'd wanted to see the "Gunks" for a few years. I especially wanted to see one of the mountain lakes. Lake Minnewaska, when I finally reached it, did indeed have its picturesque aspects - pale cliffs rising from turquoise water, the rocks capped with ragged pines and laced with the deep crimson of autumn blueberry foliage. In the afternoon light it was quite a sight. Unfortunately, there were prohibitively strong, icy autumn winds all three times I made the drive. It was hard to make even a quick sketch without pencil and paper blowing away and my fingers getting too numb to work. Apart from that, I also managed to arrive just before sunset and gate-closing time all three days, having been distracted along the way by other sights.

When the sun was out in the Shawangunks, the autumn leaves were as bright and beautiful as I'd seen anywhere. Larry took me to a couple of spots that were outstanding for sightseeing and walking but more literally stunning for painting purposes. In general, I find peak fall color to be much more distracting than useful as subject matter, scattering my attention and making it hard to find something that speaks to or for more than the eyes. Two of the many things I attempted to sketch and paint on the way to Lake Minnewaska were a winding creek and a farm with the Shawangunk Mountains in the background. The farm painting took a few hours, and the whole time I was trying to tear myself away. "You'll miss the daylight at Lake Minnewaska," I kept telling myself. And I was right.

The weather, the fall colors, the long drives to find subject matter (I usually don't allow myself that on tour - there's too much driving just getting to my hosts) and my not having painted for a while all kept me unfocused and frustrated on many levels. My last morning, to fortify my spirits, I made myself do a more simple, quick painting of a pine tree on the rocks above Lake Minnewaska that I'd seen the day before but been too cold and tired to paint in person. I limited myself to 30 minutes, between packing and a quick breakfast, and did it sitting on my bed with a sketchpad open. Some people find the result too simplistic and sloppy, but, at the time, its lively energy cheered me up and made me feel better about the visit.

Unfortunately, the time spent painting and cleaning up generated new stresses: I was late for a meeting and then had to skip lunch to get to my next stop in time to look around before sunset. The meeting was in the city of Kingston, with Lynn. There I saw many of her excellent paintings and the pleasing, old urban setting she painted. I would like to have had another few days to draw and paint in the neighborhood. Especially at night. Urban night scenes would be an excellent foil to all the colorful foliage, a good way to concentrate my artistic energy, sharpen my focus and intention.

The previous evening Lynne had put on a "meet the itinerant artist" evening, a chance for me to get together with her many painting friends. This was the first time I'd been hosted by another artist or been introduced to a local art community while on tour. It sounded like a good chance to compare notes and network. But, because I wasn't so happy with my paintings (reasonably or not), it turned out to be more of a chance to feel out of place. I was too worn out and discouraged to have the nerve to say much - about touring, gift exchange, all the reasons I push myself out on the road as an itinerant - all the things I'd want to share with other artists. In fact, even at my best, except for a few painter friends at home, I tend not to go out of my way to mingle with artists. It's a matter of not wanting to feel or be redundant; I think of artists as leavening to disperse in society, not to concentrate. While I'm certainly open to doing more - and more effective - networking with artists in future tours (dialogue, discussion, sharing, etc.), this was an awkward start. I thank Lynn, though, for making it happen and letting me have an introduction to a new dimension for my touring. The food was great, too.


BRANT LAKE, NY

Brant Lake is fairly high up in the eastern Adirondacks, a place of steep little mountains, rugged slopes covered with a mix of assorted hardwoods and stately white pines. My destination was the home of Bob and Leslie Harrison, which turned out to be a little horse farm with a view of the lake.

With my visit limited to a 24-hour stopover, I figured I'd better try to get a painting done as soon as I arrived. I gave in to the color and painted with a sense of something like frivolity. I tried to leave out the horses, but the scene seemed empty without them. I tried to leave them out partly because I'd never painted horses before. In 5th grade, I recall, most of the girls in my class seemed to know how to draw horses better than I can now. Something about how horses are put together eludes me.

The next day it was cold, gray, foggy and drizzling. For painting I was more or less confined to the view from my bedroom window. The forced focus, the subdued colors, the way the horses just stood there in the rain, the previous afternoon's practice with horsy forms and possibly the home-made brownies and ice cream I'd had the night before all contributed to my doing a bit better in my 2nd attempt at painting horses.

It was a short visit indeed. And just as well for me. Leslie and Bob were friendly, smart, interesting and generally enjoyable to get to know, but the household got up around 5 am, and there wasn't much chance of not noticing and joining in, even if 5 am is much, much closer to my bedtime than when I'm accustomed to waking up.

On the way to Vermont, the big excitement was seeing if my car could make it over a mountain and on to the next town, starting with the gas gauge on "E." As usual, getting a last painting done had put me behind schedule for my departure, and I couldn't stand to drive the 1 or 2 miles back to town for gas, when there was sure to be another town along my way, just around the corner. Unfortunately, most of the dots on my map that I took for towns didn't have gas, or even an identifiable presence in reality. I was relieved to find that I could go 40 miles or so after the needle dropped below empty.

HARTLAND, VT

Jay and Edie are friends from college. I hadn't seen them for a long time - not since meeting them in San Francisco during my first IAP Tour in 2000. Usually on tour I avoid staying with people I know; I tend to do better at getting into my traveling artist role – which is a fairly demanding shift from regular life – when the role is well-defined and also the most comfortable option available. Being with friends or family can confuse things, make it too easy to relax. On this trip, though, it was a welcome break to see familiar faces and just visit like a normal friend. I painted, too, but the fact that I was catching up with old friends made the trip start to feel less crazy. As noted on the October Tour introductory page, I was having trouble getting into the spirit of the Itinerant Artist Project this time.

Jay, Edie and their two sons, Cedar and Silas, had been living in a co-housing eco-village in Hartland, Vermont for several years, and I'd been curious to see what it was like. What I found was a couple dozen nicely designed, newish houses clustered on a hillside above a working dairy barn, with farm fields stretching up the valley and pastures rising steeply up a nearby hill. The place is something like 60% self-sufficient, with a brewery down the road for some of the remaining 40%. There's a pretty good sense of community, a shared furnace for all the houses, a sense of living close to the land and being very comfortably middle class at the same time.

Several of Jay's large, exciting abstract canvases were hanging in the common building. Around the house I saw smaller paintings, life-size puppets and props for puppet theater, original mosaic tiling all around the bathroom, photos of his latest sculpture, and more. Jay's a serious artist and creative powerhouse, when he's not doing other stuff. He can paint a strong landscape when he wants, but his sensibility is more contemporary or aesthetically progressive. My little paintings of everyday scenes felt decidedly humble by contrast, and I imagined he found them most interesting as expressions of the overarching, more conceptual project. Edie, however, made it clear that she was looking forward to a "Jim Mott" landscape, so i couldn't conceptualize myseldf out of my painterly obligations.

A most interesting response came from Cedar, who, at 12, is perceptive enough for me to take very seriously. The afternoon I arrived, I painted a view of Mount Ascutney from a field above the houses and another view looking back at the houses (not shown). I was looking for a place to set the paintings to dry . I was also trying to avoid anyone seeing me but ran into Cedar... I was almost embarrassed to show him, thinking he'd find the little paintings dull compared with the bolder stuff he was used to seeing. But, no: "Wow," he said, "I don't see people painting the things you see around here like that. That's cool." It seemed he had so much exposure to a more avant-garde aesthetic that landscape had the appeal of novelty. At any rate, I was pleased that he saw it with fresh eyes and that he liked what he saw.

The Cobb Hill co-housing community was founded, in part, by Dana Meadows, a luminary and visionary from Dartmouth College whom I'd never met. But her influence and her name wafted around the place like a warm uplifting breeze. On my 2nd day there, I took a short hike up to her memorial bench. It's perched near the top of a steep, long meadow. I wanted to sit quietly there and meditate, but I'd brought Josie the dog. Josie was supposed to sit quietly with me, but she kept trotting around, snuffling, jingling her collar, running up and asking me to throw sticks. Eventually I gave up on deeper reflections and sketched my distractor. Back at the house, I turned one of the sketches into a simple painting.

The beehives painting was done on location on my last morning. I wanted to record something of the farm and also the wonderful shades of green, blue and yellow that someone had used to make the functional beehives double as a decorative installation. Jay and Edie chose this one as their host painting.


FISHERS ISLAND, NY

After a quick stop in Brattelboro to see galleries with another college art friend, Marin Robinson, it was on to New London, CT and the ferry to Fisher's Island - a bit of New York state located in Long Island Sound, much closer to Connecticut.

My hosts there were Matt and Polly Heeney (Matt being a cousin of mine) and her parents, Kate & Paul Collins. Matt had been urging me to visit and paint at Fishers Island for a few years. The evening I arrived, I wondered what all the fuss was about – in fact felt as out of place and creatively perplexed as anywhere, until I saw Isabella Beach. I'd been missing the ocean more than I knew. Somehow the few simple ingredients – sand, water, sky, sunlight – made me feel profoundly welcome and at home for the first time in weeks. That is discussed in the previous October Tour Intro page. What I didn't say was that I also finally caught up on sleep Sunday morning, my first morning with my new hosts. But I was so embarrassed to get up at 11 – to an empty house – that I felt I had to prove I wasn't completely lazy. That, as much as anything, fired me up to paint and led to the three paintings that afternoon.

It was strange to be getting in a creative groove just when it was time to head back home, but that's how it goes sometimes. And that one day, one afternoon, painting at the beach was worth the whole trip's worth of struggle – in fact made it all seem pretty fun and worthwhile.

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