A little story about me. When I was a youngster, rounding bout 12, I found out I could draw. It wasn't any grand revelation, just a pencil stub and a scrap of paper when I was bored, but suddenly the inside and the backside of my Pee-Chee folder was full of horses and barns and crooked fences that looked like they belonged there. A teacher noticed. Mrs. Meppen, the dragon lady, a tiny woman, full of hell fire and brimstone was her name. We all loved her. One afternoon she pressed two battered cardboard boxes into my hands... charcoals worn down to nubs, chalk pastels soft as bread, and a thick pad of real drawing paper that smelled of pulp and promise. "Take these home," she said. "See what you can do when nobody's grading you." I took them home, and I never really came all the way back. That winter the Christmas cards started arriving. Those Currier & Ives prints everybody sent in the sixties and seventies, the ones with sleighs gliding over silent hills, farmhouses glowing gold against the dusk, smoke curling lazy from brick chimneys into a sky the color of tarnished pewter. I'd sit cross-legged on the rug while the wood stove crackled, studying every card that came through the mail slot. Something in those scenes settled over me like the hush after the first big snow. The fields lay still, the roads empty, the whole world in a sigh. And the trees, Lord, the trees, bare and black and stubborn, every branch outlined in frost as though winter itself had taken it's breath and blew its name across them. They weren't pretty in the usual way. They were proud. They stood there stripped of their summer bragging and finally told the truth about themselves, and I couldn't look away. I started copying and learning from them. First with the charcoal, smudging snow with the side of my thumb until the paper felt cold. Then the pastels,white dragged over pale blue for that smoky, far-off sky; a bruised violet for shadows under the drifts; a sharp slash of raw umber for those commanding trees. I'd work until the windows went dark and the only light came from through the glass of the wood stove, the TV, and the house itself seemed to lean in and watch. I'm a good deal older now, hair a tinge gray, and many of my paintings are out there with others now, but every December, when the north land pulls its white quilt up to its chin and the wind sharpens its knife along the eaves , those cards come drifting back into my mind as clear as the day they slid from their envelopes. I'Il step outside to fetch the mail or haul in an armload of wood, and there it is: the same restful quiet, the same smoky sky, the same dark kings of trees holding court against the snow. Currier & Ives didn't miss a lick. They caught it exactly. Sometimes, when the light's just right and the mood takes me, I put away my oil paints and what I'm working on, and pull out paper and a stick of charcoal and my pastels. And while I draw those familiar slopes and skeletal branches, I'm twelve again, knees poked through my jeans, pastel dust on my sleeves, happier than I had any right to be, just a kid and a box of colors and a world willing to sit still long enough for me to get it down. Those winter scenes never left me. I reckon they never will. They're waiting out there right now, patient as ever, under the same pale sky that watched me learn who I was meant to be. This is a snippet detail of a larger piece. I love this proud tree. It sits at the top of a nearby slope below my place.
