First Morning in Taos

"FIRST MORNING IN TAOS" acrylic on board 12"x12"

 The name of this painting used to be "Last Spring" and it was a picture of an apple tree in blossom, painted on a one foot square piece of masonite.  I painted it in the spring of 2013, after a bad winter with my fibromyalgia, when I thought this would surely BE my last spring!

I don't know why I painted the entire board sky-blue first.  This isn't my usual routine or the way I normally paint. And when I was finished with the apple tree, I didn't like it at all. It was way too heavy-handed on the blossoms, so I put it away.

Recently, while preparing for an art show, I found the thing and a light-bulb went on in my head! This was the embryonic beginning of a Taos painting, started a whole year before I even thought of going to northern New Mexico. The sky-blue background is so fitting for Taos, where the skies can be achingly blue at times.

My first morning in Taos, I woke up and stepped out to a beautiful early spring snowfall. I grabbed my camera and walked out into the ancient apple orchard across the acequia from my cabin. Wet glops of snow covered every blossom and stuck to the tree bark. By noon, the snow had melted.

So all I needed to make this a "Taos painting" was to add snow to the tree trunk and ground. And an authentic Taos painting was born: 

"FIRST MORNING IN TAOS."

War Zone - America

[NOTE: Photos borrowed from news sources show recent violent, racial rioting in Ferguson, MO.]

The Second Coming

by W. B. Yeats (1919)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

PRAY FOR PEACE!