The place I live does affect my work. I could argue that I live a lot in my head and that most of my work comes from that place; however, while that is true, the physical place I live in must affect the imaginative one to quite a degree. In Missoula, there are three things going on. One is that my eyes have a great expanse of sky to retreat in. By retreat, I mean that my eyes spend an inordinate amount of time checking details. I'm an editor, I write, I read, and I draw. So the expanse I'm afforded here is a way for my eyes to retreat into space and away from the minutiae. This makes them rested and able for any work I do with text and any work I do with art.

The second aspect is that the colors are subdued and pale, somewhat dry and dusty. I can work with these colors or no color at all. I love all colors. Color is life. But color can be so distracting to me and should be viewed in short durations. Just like being in places that I love, love, love for short periods of time, if I view color that way, it won't overwhelm me. But if I use color in my art, I always make it muddy.

(I went to Butchart Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia once at the end of the summer. The vibrant colors of the multitude of flowers screamed at me. Really screamed!! By the end of a several hour walk through the gardens, I was dizzy and could barely keep my eyes open. But it is the most beautiful gardens I've ever seen.)

And the final aspect (I'm sure there are more but I'm trying to keep it somewhat simple for myself.) is that once my eyes bounce back from their scan of the skies, of the mountains in the distance, they focus once again on that which is near. Besides what resides in my head, there is so much little stuff here that I like to examine - lichen, bugs, mushrooms, bark, stones, water.

Well, now. I've forgotten about aerial views. I guess they're not really of Missoula, so I can't say that they are an aspect of Missoula that influences my art. Or are they? I fly in and out of Missoula several times a year, over the Rockies. I always get a window seat. I look at the mountains, ridges, roads, and rivers. They become a small detail to examine, albeit from quite a far.

So this physical place in, around, and above me has yes, greatly influenced my art to this point. The question is how it might continue to do so without becoming stale or if place will matter less once the place has really sunk in.

There are many places that I love. Some I love so much that I really couldn't live there. Those places are best kept perfect in my dreams and memories, places like the damp woods along the shores of Whidbey Island outside of Seattle, like the sheep green hills of the Isle of Arran in southern Scotland, like the misty mountain temples and shrines of Nikko, Japan, like the warm and hidden beaches of Kauai. I imagine moving to any one of those places, but I'm afraid there'd be a short honeymoon, and I'd start to see their flaws. I'd rather not know they had any.

I've lived in several places that I don't love, and I'm thankful not to be in them anymore. Those places are crowded, visibly polluted, strip malled and brick walled. They suffocate, unnaturally. There is no place to take a deep breath and feel the figurative roots digging into the underground. I've spent my life working my way out of them, sometimes more slowly than I would have liked.

So when I moved to Missoula, I still had the anxious thought of "where to next?" Surely, this place isn't going to be IT for me. Not yet. I want the place that would match me on one of those best-places-to-live quizzes on the Internet.

But I'm here two and a half years now, and suddenly I realize that I can't lift my feet freely off of the ground here because something is growing from them, downward.

I spent three months this winter in Beacon, New York, along the Hudson. Beacon is a comforting little town, once home to brick factories, now home to the largest contemporary art museum in the U.S. - the Dia:Beacon. It has a long, narrow, main street filled with interesting little shops, cafes, and art galleries, all working hard to stay alive. It has little houses, new and old, on little plots of land, each different, funky like the ones in Missoula. Nothing perfect but all about character. I like being in that place, even though I've only been in it when the weather is cold, and I don't even like cold weather.

While in Beacon, I thought about returning to Missoula and then thinking seriously about my next move, finding that next best place. Oregon? Washington? New Mexico? British Columbia? I made a wish list of the positive attributes of a new place. It was then that I began to see that the items on my wish list were mostly the positives of Missoula - small town with an active and historic center, small town that is not chained to another town in a long line of towns, small town surrounded by protective mountains, small town with water, small town with an arts community. How long would I have to search to find a place similar but better than Missoula?

Returning to Missoula from Beacon, "OMG" was my mantra, once again, as we flew over the mountains into the valley. I'll never tire of that fantastic return. And returning to Missoula, there were friends and other artists and artist friends that I wanted to catch up with. Yes, there are people here that I can catch up with. That's when I really felt the roots expanding (even though the ground was still winter frozen). Do I really want to pick up and move somewhere and find these people all over again? Can I really pick up and move somewhere and tap into an artist community so quickly as I did here?

I've had friends in all of the places I've lived. Good friends that are still in my life. So I'm not concluding that place is all about friends. But it is all about being someplace where I will let roots grow. And I'll let roots grow because I believe in the place: It's got a great deal of the natural. It's generally healthy in body and spirit. It loves its artists. I can work in it and be productive. I've seen its flaws and they don't scare me. I'm satisfied.

Maybe the key is just the word satisfied. Satisfied may sound like only one step up from depressed, but it is a good state of mind. You can do a lot with satisfied. You can stop reaching for the illusion of perfect and really focus on other things (like creative and personal evolution and development).

So I can save those places that I love, love, love for little respites. And I can plant myself in places like Beacon for short durations. I can fill my soul with different vistas. But I will watch them all fade as I fly over the mountains back into this valley. Just look what I'm working with here:

Four months later and it took a trip down the frozen Hudson to write, again, about place.

Notes on the train from Beacon to Grand Central:

The Hudson up here in Beacon (the train has just pulled out of the station) is white with great, gray blocks of ice jutting out in a haphazard textural pattern, the best kind. White sits on the hills across the river, a vellum layer. There is no color other than white, silver, and a whisper of dulled brown. It's a sepia-tinted photograph that scrolls on as we move along. Silver sifts on quiet.

At the next train stop, I imagine a balmy summer day and hear laughter and energy on the platform. This moment now, is a contrast, a winter day cathedral in which we all silently pass through.

Further down river, sun breaks through the vellum, round and haloed. It brings a subtle wash to the sky, a pale concoction on the steel gray canvas to the west. Where are we?

Coffee and cream, hot and steamy. Cashmere overcoats, layers of scarves, leather briefcases are all on their way to some office. I want a beautiful black turtleneck, I'm reminded. Classic.

We've moved away from the river to the back allies of auto repair, large equipment lots, scrap metal. Their rust, mud, decay, sadness obscured in white. Estuaries or tributaries interrupt the scene from time to time.

We're in Cortlandt, but where is that? DOT yards, construction yards, bright orange plastic netting as fences. The color is more obnoxious than when it isn't surrounded by the white.

Telephone wires. Fog! The river again. No blocks of ice this time. Trees here grow twisted and mangled, not the straight and stalwart ones up north. The photograph has erasures.

A train yard. Rows and rows of box cars, still, and graphite. Crumbling docks. Vacant boats. An un-trampled river walkway, waiting.

A larger train yard. Croton-Hudson, no, Croton-Harmon. Pay attention to the stops next time. No need to write this again. Where is Croton-Harmon? Where are the towns I know? Track 4. 8023. Royal blue stripes and yellow rubber pads. We've stopped here too long. Let's get going. I feel the energy coming. Next stop, 125th Street. "There we go! Sorry for the delay. We're having a problem with these doors."

Canadian geese float. Do they think? Why do they wait? The fog creates hills among the clouds, and snow clumps in little balls on the tips of the tall grasses along the banks. Bent slightly with weight, a wondrous curve of line.

Barbed wire curls along high brick walls. A prison. Sing Sing. If I were a prisoner, I don't know if I'd feel solace in the routine whistle of the train or the sorrow in my loss of travel. That's easy to answer.

Sky, river, trees. One mess of tepid gray. The magic and majesty of the northern end of my journey have gone. The Tappen Zee Bridge and an itty, bitty lighthouse. Hudson Harbor condos for sale. The bridge ends in a mist.

Was that a man and a woman standing on that deserted peninsula over there or just two charred stumps?

Ice again, in jaundiced circles. Cranes at work, moving stuff. Metal cranes, not live ones. I can barely see the other side. The hill tops are a faint pencil line undulating across the page. One lone American flag says there is no wind.

The first boat of the day. A tanker moving up river. The northern tip of Manhattan begins in earnest. Winter dead vines function together with power lines, one with the promise of energy in the spring, one with the expectation of energy now.

The pencil has now drawn discernible jagged edges. A red buoy. It, too, waits. Trees and grasses are blackened here from the City soot. Even the boulders are charred. The sun welcomes us to the East River as we approach the 125th Street station, or at least it attempts to clear the clouds for our day. The towers of the George Washington Bridge are to my right, perhaps five miles away. The clouds are more distinct now with varying colors and patterns. I'm glimpsing, really. Blue among the clouds. Wow. It's hot in here, especially with five layers against my chest.

Here comes the garbage, no longer hidden under the white. Always by the tracks, forgotten things or things to be forgotten. Crossing the East River to the Isle of Manhattan. We'll soon be underground to Grand Central.

Pigeons huddle, taxis wait. So much waiting. Writing is waiting. On to the next.

A place is also determined by the micro or macro perspective, not just by our own myopic views of it. I've mentioned previously that I would like to work on aerial views of a place, having spent a lot of time flying in and out of Missoula in the past two years. Aerial views are the counterpoint to both my interest in minute details and my reality here on the ground. They help me to see that I am both small and insignificant, yet simultaneously a contribution to the life force on this planet. This is my first attempt at combining the macro and micro world. This piece is titled Lichen on the Valley. It's quite literal. The Missoula valley is surrounded by the Northern Rockies, and I've covered it with lichen. This piece consists of two layers. The bottom layer is a line drawing in ink on cotton rag paper. The top layer is a dots drawing in ink on vellum. The vellum does not rest snugly against the bottom layer, which then gives this piece an ethereal feel (perhaps not clear in this image). A dots drawing means that I have created my image with thousands and thousands of tiny ink dots. To me this piece looks like an old worn tapestry. And can you see the thread of highway 90 cutting diagonally through it?

The image of a pleasant place. It's often the idea of something that appeals to me more than the reality of it. Admittedly, I spend more time looking at this pleasant spot than sitting in it. The colors are what attract me. The bright red of my neighbor's barn as seen behind my apricot tree. That red glows through my studio window, better than any oil painting I could create, at the brightest times of day. The cool pistachio of the plastic Adirondack chair is a great compliment to the red. And then the blue skies of Missoula. Ahh. . . those skies. This is a happy place!!

Weather is a place. It is a place within a place. When we experience it, it colors the location. It can define the location. We bring it to each new location; that is, we bring our experience with a particular weather with us from place to place and can be reminded of each place in which we've experienced it.

Upon awakening the past two mornings, I've heard rain hitting the hard, dry ground. Many would take this as an excuse to stay under the covers. I immediately get out of bed and go sit by an open window. As long as it doesn't bring bitter cold with it, I enjoy rain, even more so in a hot, dry, Western Montana August. Rain's patter invites me to pick up a book and read by the window, even before breakfast, the computer, or a shower. It's a gift for the day.

Nostalgia sets in as I remember rains that washed away the sticky heat of summers in Connecticut or New Jersey. You open the windows wide. The rain pours out of the sky, bouncing off plants in the backyard. I can't read with this rain. I must watch it, feel it. The green of that rain is brilliant. My gardens are drunk laden with every drop.

Riding the train to the small town of Nikko in Japan - with the Toshogu Shrine and Mausoleum dedicated to the Shogunate of Tokugawa Ieyasu - soft rain begins to fall in the cedar groves along the tracks. Stepping outside the train, I find the rain to really be the falling away of mist, lots of mist. I walk alone through this town, treating myself to green tea and snacks in a local shop, windows wide open, the musty smell of damp wood, speaking only Japanese. The day is colored by that mist, that moisture, the low grey sky. The day is heaven.

Hiking Deception Pass in Puget Sound, Washington, with Kelly and Neil, undeterred by the rain, prepared for it with parkas, the rain here, the cedar and cypress here, I'm back in Japan. I'm outside in it. The rain is the place; it's just that the scenery and location on the map have changed.

Here now, August in Montana, my window seat is the place that sits by the rain. The rain that sends up images from past rain and place experiences. The rain has stopped. Perhaps that's it for today, this week, the rest of this month. But I'll remember this rain, like all the others. I hold onto these weather as place conceptions and recollections.