“In Plain Sight (Trail of Cedars)"
Oil on Belgian linen panel, 24x18
​2024
Honorable Mention- 11th Annual Landscape—Teravarna  - August 2024
Honorable Mention- The Green Spectrum—Ten Moir Gallery- August 2024
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This moment comes from the Trail of Cedars in Glacier National Park—an ecological gem where North America’s northern, southern, eastern and western ecosystems collide. I worked that summer by horseback in West Glacier, which boasts this ancient cedar forest, the most eastern rainforest on the continent. To travel to Glacier for a few days is a lifetime trip for some—but you can’t learn the depth of beauty or range of moods that a landscape knows until you live there, and stay outside from dawn to dusk, learning the seasons and weather. There was no internet and no cell phone reception, just good old-fashioned hiking, kayaking, and birdwatching during time off. I bought a field guide, and downloaded a library of bird calls, and had the time of my life stalking birds that summer. I followed this little one all over the woods that June day trying to get a picture clear enough to decipher its non-descript markings. After much pouring over grainy, zoomed images, and studying the nuanced, varying, belly markings of tiny, brown birds in my book (which they themselves had not bothered to read or adhere to)--of course! It could only have been a hermit thrush. 
 
This was painted onto a medium-grain, but smoothly primed Belgian linen on ¾” panel. This texture provided is actually my favorite so far for oil paint—almost portrait-smooth, with just enough underlying texture to add character to the finished piece, but without changing brush strokes or washes. Unfortunately, I only bought two of them ten years ago, and they have been long-since discontinued by the manufacturer in a brand merger. The other such panel was used for Autumn Retreats from the Chugach,