Working from life is a major part of my process- however I don't always have the ability or time to paint on scene.  Below are  a couple of sketches and one of the resulting paintings based on recent fires in Yosemite.  

In late April 2014 I flew over a familiar stretch of I-40.  A week and a half later I was driving that stretch of road back to Yosemite.  It got me thinking about what the landscape's role is in most people's lives.  It is a relationship that seems to be increasingly ambiguous, the land's main affect being the creation of distance between people and their constructed activities. I spent the driving distance equivalent of two or three Rhode Island's waiting for the chance to take a quick picture of the sky where I had been so recently.  

Here is to being nearly in the same place, nearly at the same time.