[watercolor above by MSM, coupled with a Bryan L Moore photo from a camping trip in Badghis Province, Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne, August 2009 – August 2010]

“Waiting for Snow”, a plagiaristic homage to the then-young Lyn Foulkes*, was my first painting in acrylic, made in New Haven in the waning days of 1964 in obsessive anticipation of the east coast’s urban version of the White Stuff.  Close to 55 years later, up a mountain in Colorado, we lunched on a porch, visited Pueblo for the third time in less than a week and

awaited a promised January storm.

It arrived

about four a.m. Friday, making for an interior

[save for having to sweep the porch each trip to and back from the studio] couple of days.

The snow

continued into Saturday, deeper

and colder, leaving us

unable to get out to El Depot or the P.O., necessitating that outdoor investigations

utilize long-neglected snowshoes

and considerable effort.

The same was true for clearing that path across the porch to and from the studio, initially to stay ahead of the continuously dumping wettish white stuff until half the roof crashed down after lunch…nonetheless…

*the Lyn Foulkes paintings I was ripping/riffing off of were, unlike most of his subsequent work, the landscapes from 1962 – 63 seen at the Oakland Museum.