Moonlight in Vermont

After a couple of depressing weeks, I've managed to get myself back. I forced myself out of the house to go to The Studio Store in Johnson to buy a tube of paint. It worked. (The paint served not quite the same purpose as the pencil did in Virginia Woolf's Street Haunting, but similar.)

I mucked with my colors when I came back, and the next day got this onto a small stretched canvas (garage sale reclamation). It's number 4, I think, in my Moonlight in Vermont series. And, every time I work on this project, I curse the modern cars that are now endowed with the inability to turn off the headlights.

There is a stretch of straight road just as I turn off Route 104 whenever I come home from St. Albans. At least once a year, when the moon was bright and I happened to be coming home that way at night, I used to turn off my headlights as I made that turn, and drive for a bit in a moonlit world. It always gave me a few moments of deep pleasure. And, now, no more.

Vermont Artists and a Coincidence

I've just spent the morning checking out a number of Vermont artists and what I saw was indeed "something to write home about."

Art of Action Finalists will take you to the AOA project coordinator's blog where he offers links to those artists who have a web presence. Take your time with these sites. (Skip mine.)

If you, like so many non-Vermonters, are one of those who has experienced Vermont as a state of mind rather than an actual place, you will get your grounding here.

What I've seen this morning makes me jealous of painters. Makes me love them unreservedly. And at this moment it also creates one of those "coincidences" that often occur to us, and which we usually shrug off.

Last night, early evening actually, I went outdoors to have my last cigarette of the day and noticed a faint, small reddish glow in the distance, rather near my neighbor's house. I determined that it wasn't emanating from their house, and began to get a bit alarmed as the glow was on a hill, and reddish -- in the countryside this usually means fire. As I kept watching, it began to get brighter and less red. And, in the time it took for one small, self-rolled cigarette, the moon rose, fully engulfed in wisps of clouds and pieces of night. I wept because I could not paint.