The terrain of the Adirondack Mountains is timeworn, wild, and so thoroughly beautiful. Its ambiance is a serene quiet---a boundless poetic thrum of wilderness, spurred on between wistful mountain songs of White Breasted sparrows, stones scuttling down mountainside chutes, or the distant crackle of a limb dropping into deep forest. Brooks and cascades are opalescent and lyrical, flowing effortlessly despite innumerable obstacles. Rocks, and boulders the size of houses are clothed in antique patterns of lichens, mosses, and mineral stains. Crystals in the gabbro glisten through clear water---scintillating blue, purple, green and gold, enhancing pools of emerald.
Climbing above tree line, ascending into environs of High Peaks tundra, at this elevation I begin to discern the challenge of isolation a painter requires in capturing fortuitous if not inexplicable qualities of light and form. Engaging a vermillion sun with paint and panel, profiles of distant ranges become luminous and magnificent. At dusk’s onset, there is just time to retreat down slopes and slides and throw up a tent. During these nocturnal hours, I’ve often remained on high, hurriedly glimpsing and responding before pallet chromes fade. Feeling remote and solitary atop dark and windy peaks is not so much a hardship but a metaphysical experience---at rest on smooth granite, settled by celestial dreams, and waking to the first light of a breaking dawn, and evolving radiance of a day.
The Adirondack hinterland is unto itself, and the act of painting in this preserve is earned, and it is edifying. Embracing sublime bonds, feeling its compelling grace in memory, or when venturing again across its borders, the wilderness of the Adirondacks is forever a homeland.
