The terrain of the Adirondack Mountains is timeworn, wild, and profoundly alluring. A serene quiet permeates the ambiance of this place---a boundless poetic thrum of wilderness---amid wistful songs from White Breasted Sparrows, a distant crackle of a limb dropping in the forest or the muffled scuttling of stones down a mountainside chute. The needles of Balsam breezily blanket dark sphagnum earth, precipitating such a welcome and fitting fragrance. Brooks and their cascades are lyrical and opalescent, flowing effortlessly, despite innumerable obstacles. Rocks, and boulders the size of houses are clothed in antique patterns of lichens, mosses, and mineral stains. The elusive spectacle of feldspar crystals embedded in the ancient gabbro, glistening, scintillating turquoise, purple, rose, and gold, is nearly mystical---sunlit glimmering-color spots beaming from wet, polished walls channeling into translucent pools. Being surrounded by a myriad of entrancements, so inherent in this refuge’s profusion of ravines and peaks, homage of any kind involves choosing to discover and love a multitude of wonders, and to feel rewarded for the effort.
Climbing above tree line, ascending into environs of High Peaks tundra, at this elevation begins the affirmation of isolation for a painter in search of fortuitous qualities of light and form. Facing a vermillion sun with paint and panel, aerial profiles of distant ranges become luminous and magnificent. At dusk’s onset, there is just time to retreat down slopes and throw together a tent, though during nocturnal hours I’ve often remained on high, hurriedly glimpsing and reacting before palette chromes fade. Inhabiting summits at night, the suggestion of 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 in vivid dreams; waking as stars fade with the first light of breaking dawn; rising to seize the evolving radiance of another new day.
The Adirondack hinterland is unto itself, and the act of painting in this preserve is earned and is edifying. Engaging sublime bonds, perceiving its compelling grace, from memory or when venturing again across its borders, the wilderness of the Adirondacks is, for always, a homeland.
