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.

Months after photographing the veil of fog on Whidbey Island (see the previous post), I created this pastel drawing on cotton paper. I used two colors of soft pastels - blue and gray. The blue is rubbed into the paper, creating a solid, yet finely muted background for the sky and water. The gray was delicately added to suggest the hills and pines across the cove and to suggest three birds in the water. The birds were the only sights and sounds of life in the foggy cove. This piece does not clearly resemble what I actually saw, but to me, it has the spirit of that morning. I have never done a pastel landscape before but would like to try it again - with the softest and most subtle of colors.

One November morning in Penn Cove on Whidbey Island outside of Seattle, we awoke to a thick veil of fog. It was one of the most ethereal sites I'd ever seen, and I wanted to capture its essence on paper.