One of the best things for my plein air painting life is to have a friend who is just as anxious as I am to get out to paint regularly. I am lucky enough to have met a new friend who exactly fills that description. To make that date, to make a plan, and to share the process, ensures showing up and not getting derailed by the lure of the self-deluding ideas that minor tasks could or should be done before art. Recognizing yourself delaying doing what you'd really rather be doing, that irrational avoidance, is a skill in itself. Having a means of simply going around that hurdle is one strategy. And, the most simple, and so, joyful strategy.

We are again heading into late summer and fall, a great time to paint out of doors. The seasons come around again too fast and time seems to pass me by which shocking speed. And, shocking too is seeing how long it has been since I last made a blog entry. I still have not integrated making these entries into my life but I would like to. So I hope to make and keep the resolution to up date more regularly and specifically to get back quickly with photos of some of the plein air studies I have worked on so far this summer. Late summer and fall the sun gets lower in the sky and the air becomes drier resulting in a quality of light that is just so exquisite. In late autumn too we get the extraordinary fall colors as well as the long, blue shadows, and golden light. The beauty can make me feel faint just driving around town sometimes.