Masterpiece

     West of Gettysburg, PA there is a mountain range referred to as the Blue Mountains, a ridge of the Appalachian Mountains. It is depicted in this painting.

     Friends in Cape Cod who saw this painting thought it was water in the distance, painted with a very shaky hand for the horizon.

     While I love my water and skies on Cape, there was a certain peacefulness to rolling fields and mountains of Pennsylvania, where I grew up and called home until I was 37.  I miss it, sometimes.

     Wide open skies.  Be they over the land or over water, clearly there is consistency here for me in being drawn to paint them.  They speak to the magnificence of creation.  Of God's palette and artistry that so far supersedes anything I can dream of painting.

     Humbling to think that the same God who brought this beauty into the world also created you, and me.  Though the word most often used in translations of Ephesians 2:10 is 'handiwork' I am rather fond of this translation: "For we are God's masterpiece."

     Humbling.  Truly humbling.  And a call for this artist to lean into the gift of painting.  I question it far too often.  Buy into the age old "you can't make a living doing art - better have something to fall back on." 

     Those things, the fall backs, have been more like fall downs for me.  In this season, with spring and summer just around the corner, I choose to lean more deeply into my painting.  Let's see where it goes... this time around.