I've started in on a fresh series of landscapes. The best way to start this sort of adventure is by looking. The best way to see what you are looking at is by drawing. And the best way to study is by looking at what others who've gone before have made.

So, I'm happy to be back to the drawing board at the very beginning of something I've been working at for many, many years. Keeping a beginner's mind is a helpful way to approach almost anything.

This summer, I'm offering an online foundation course in drawing and watercolor for absolute beginners and for anyone willing to assume a beginner's mind. Need a helping hand to start or get back to your own practice? Join us!

Stay tuned for more drawings.

There's a full moon coming up next Monday, the 16th. From what I understand, the full moon is a perfect opportunity to drop what no longer serves us and accept the power to make structural changes in our lives that can allow us to alter the course of our path a bit and feel better. Everyone knows (don't they?) that if we feel better within ourselves, it naturally follows that we can help others feel better, too.

It's the Flower Moon of May. Maybe her light can clarify your situation a bit so that you can see better and help you change your perspective. Change your perspective, change your reality.

What if the greatest journey of your life has yet to begin? Anything is possible. Some journeys are launched with just the tilt of a head. Try looking at yourself a little differently, at life a little differently. Put one foot in front of the other, do the next right thing, and wonder what new magic life might hold in store.

My suggestion is that you mark this full moon by deciding what it is you're going to shed. It's not a bad idea to write out your musings on paper and then write down (with intention) what it is you're deciding to shed. Then let it go. Burn the paper if you have to.

The power of a full moon is usually in session three days before and three days after the apex.

In preparation, you can spend some time collecting items for the trash or give away. It's absolutely true that clearing out physical clutter leads to clearing psychic and emotional clutter.

Make like a snake and shed some skin. Figuratively, of course. It couldn't hurt.

It's the 88th day of the year and World Piano Day.

I've never heard of this day before but spotted it sliding by on some social media this morning and decided to make a post because I love the piano and piano music.

I'm just sharing a quick list of my favorite pianists over the course of my journey and you might want to think of yours today.

My father was an early audiophile and bought records from Sam Goody at his first shop in New York. As I was thinking of my list here, I realized that I associate each pianist with either a particular composer or performance.

In the early days of vinyl, there were only so many recordings. Because my father was crazy about Beethoven, he brought home Artur Schnabel's recordings of the Beethoven Piano Sonatas as each volume was released on vinyl. I may as well have been breathing those recordings through my early childhood.

Once I was trained to properly handle LPs, the amplifier, turntable and diamond stylus, Walter Geisiking introduced me to Debussy, Dinu Lipatti to Chopin, and Van Cliburn to Rachmaninoff.

During the summers, my dad would take me down to the old Robin Hood Dell for evening concerts with the Philadelphia Orchestra. The night that Van Cliburn performed, it rained. All of the Friends of the Dell in the excellent up-front seats scurried off under umbrellas and I followed my dad down the center aisle where we sat in the rain watching Van Cliburn play up close and personal.

Around this chapter of my musical life, Columbia Records placed a plastic insert in Time Magazine with a recording of Dave Brubeck's Take Five as a promotion for Time Out. I played that thing over and over until the stylus cut clean through the grooves of that flimsy plastic. I guess that was my introduction to jazz piano. Little did I know what riches were to come along those lines.

Once I came of babysitting age, I helped a couple of doctors with their children and after those children were asleep, I'd finger through their album collection. One evening, I found a recording of Mozart Piano Sonatas and put it on to listen. I kept thinking that I heard someone else in the house. It was dark and I was pretty creeped out. After walking all around the house, looking upstairs and down, I finally realized that the person I heard was on the recording I was listening to. That was my introduction to Glenn Gould and he introduced me to Mozart's piano work and J.S. Bach on the keyboard. In those days, he was a highly controversial performer especially in music school/audiophile circles. You either loved him or hated him. I loved him.

Briefly, I worked for John Sears who ran the music department at John Wanamaker's flagship store, downtown, Philadelphia. We mostly sold pianos there (I helped with the sheet music) and had a special, separate, beautiful room with high windows overlooking the streets below entirely dedicated to a grand Bösendorfer piano, or maybe two. I can't remember. Able musicians would often glide in to try it out with its extra keys under a hinged cover. One day a customer mentioned something to John about a Chickering piano. I remember John Sears saying "Chickering, Chickering... Abraham Lincoln once owned a Chickering!" It's funny the bits we remember.

That was during the phase I hung out with composers and record store managers who brought me all sorts of wonderful recordings. One of those was Robert Tear's recording of Vaughan Williams Songs of Travel with Gerald Moore providing the accompaniment. That was my introduction to Moore who wrote and recorded the The Unashamed Accompanist, a revelation and delight.  Unfortunately, that recording has completely evaporated but, fortunately, Will Liverman and Jonathan King recently nailed that cycle magnificently.

In my early 20s, my then husband gave me one of my best birthday presents ever: season tickets to the Great Pianists series at Royce Hall. I remember breathlessly watching  Vladimir Ashkenazy, and saw Andre Watts, maybe Byron Janis and Alfred Brendel. But I particularly remember Walter Klein's performance because mid-some piece or other, one of the ivories flew off into the audience and at the end of that movement or piece, Klein turned to the audience and asked if there was a piano technician in the house. There was. The key was repaired. The performance went on.

Except for a little Brubeck, the only jazz pianist I was familiar with was Mose Allison because he played the folk circuit and we became acquainted after I traced his hands on a sheet of copy paper with a ballpoint pen. I probably watched him perform more than any other jazz pianist aside from George Gaffney, and I loved his every gig although I hated his pick up drummers because of the way they smacked the cymbals and apparently didn't mind sharing my opinion with Mose.

Of course, there was (is) Keith Jarrett who's Köln Concert recording I wore out several copies of.

After I suddenly fell head first into the cream of jazz royalty, one day I found myself standing between Ray Brown and Joe Williams in the control room of a Hollywood recording studio with Norman Granz a little off to one side watching Tommy Flanagan warm up on the other side of the glass. What a lovely man and lovely player.

Then there was the time I was sitting in the dressing room somewhere near Santa Clara, California while Sarah was making up before a performance. I heard the pianist running through some rehearsals on stage and said, "Wow, Sarah! Who is playing piano out there!? That's fantastic!" Honestly, sometimes Sarah would look at me as though I had just fallen off the cabbage truck. This time, though, she looked at me in her make up mirror and then turned around to look at me directly to make sure she could believe what she had just heard me say. I don't know how she told me but she did tell me that it was Count Basie out there. When Basie came back to visit, I gushed like, Oh wow! I've never heard you play before! You're so great! Something to that effect. He looked me up and down, walked over, poked me in the sides and said, "Yeah. You're just a young chicken." Just one of the more ridiculous moments of my life.

In the mid-80's, I had a box seat just behind and overlooking Murray Perahia at the old Asolo Theater in Sarasota, FL.  I was not familiar with Perahia but watched and listened in stunned silence and gratitude to behold such magical command of an instrument. His recording of Schubert's Impromptus is one of my favorite listens.

I'm sorry to leave out the mighty women like Alicia de Larrocha and Martha Argerich (who is a monster at the keyboard!) but I did not have first hand experience with either. I did see one or both of the Labeques perform and I'm pretty sure that it was with John McLaughlin but the details are murky at best.

The last great piano concert I can remember is Emmanuel Ax performing one of Brahms' Concertos with the Nashville Symphony.

The last piano recording I became obsessed with was Igor Zhukov's live performance (and possibly arrangement) of Cesar Franck's Prelude, Fugue and Variation in B minor.

I've left off beloved pianists and recordings, like Ellis Marsalis, Jr. and his Loved Ones album with son, Branford. But enough is enough. (Except that, thinking of Ellis Marsalis, Jr., I have to say that I'm a fan of Harry Connick, Jr.'s playing, too.)

I'm going to go walk now and listen to that Zhukov recording which I can't seem to get enough of.

More on World Piano Day.

This past week I've been looking at and learning about traditional Ukrainian embroidery patterns. Personally, I favor the plant and floral over the geometric patterns. I found an antique example and copied that in watercolor. The project was challenging, time consuming, hard on the eyes after many hours, but there it is. Once I moved from pencil to watercolor, I kept feeling as though I was working on a coat of arms. In a way, these two forms of design are similar in that they both employ coded patterns representing in one case families, in the other, cultural regions which represent a type of family. While shields offer physical protection, the embroidered patterns offer magical or energetic protection.

I dove into these patterns and related clothing art because I like them and have never before been prompted to learn about them but also because as a result of watching the unfolding assault, murder and destruction in Ukraine, I arrived at a decision.

While I do feel it's necessary to stay abreast of developments on that front, my personal life is just fine now after a long stretch of it not being fine. So, while everything is in order in my life, I am focusing on everything I have to be grateful for and am committed to appreciating the beauty I am surrounded by and to creating beauty in every way that I can. Ideally, in thoughts, words and deeds though I am having a human experience after all and do forget my high ideals at least several times a day. Fortunately, I've had a lot of practice creating beauty so that's mostly a matter of sitting down to do the work.

It is work to keep our thoughts and attitudes properly adjusted in the face of so much information coming at us so fast and so relentlessly. And so much of this information is horrific because, frankly, that's part of what is happening and, traditionally, is what sells soap.

I had an antique book of murder ballads for a while and the editor wrote a fabulous introduction in which he described how the reports and tales of heinous murders and crimes were the subjects of a large percentage of early broadsides. He also shared that as young child, his mother would hold him on her lap while singing a vast array of murder ballads.

But I digress. Slightly.

We may not have control over war and politicians and the planet, weather and life and death but we  can have control over our thoughts and what we choose to focus on. As with most things, this is a practice.

My go to remedy for refocusing my attention is to stop what I'm doing and to go outside for a walk in nature. Fortunately, I'm steps away from wooded trails filled with plant and animal life and bird song. But you can find the beauty of nature even in the most urban experience if only with plants pushing up through cracks in the sidewalk or in vacant lots, even just by looking up to see the sky. If you know what you're looking for, you can find it. I suggest you look for beauty.

If you can't go outside, bring beauty into your home. Surround yourself with as much of what you define as beautiful as you can. It's worth every penny though it doesn't have to cost a cent.

It's challenging to keep reports of the misery of the world at bay but it is not helpful to dwell on these miseries.  That is not to say that we should ignore what's happening or not help those in need in any and every way that we can. However, we may not be in a position to help in any concrete form.

Thoughts have energy. Thoughts create things like bridges and houses and families and farms and weapons of war. Thoughts create your perception of everything around you. So, how do you want to use your thoughts?

As long as there has been war, there has been music for war.

Music has been composed to inspire and encourage war, to whip up enthusiasm for war, to oppose and protest war, to announce war, accompany war, recover from war, to mourn the dead of war, to celebrate victory, to commemorate and remember war and the dead of war, to describe the effects of war.  From war cries and marches to requiems, music has been part of war.

The earliest musical instruments, the drums and flutes and trumpets have been on battlefields until relatively recently and, along with the bagpipes, still figure into military ceremony.

And then there are all of the songs from the patriotic, the morale building, the protests, the propaganda, the grief stricken, the victorious. There are a million of them stretching back as far as as we have evidence. Johnny's Gone for a Soldier, Dixie, Cohan's Over There, Edwin Starr's War!, Peter Gabriel's Games Without Frontiers, David Gilmore's Cruise. I've written a few songs related to war, myself.

Because there is so much music associated with war and because I wanted to find some emotional solace for what I have been witnessing in Ukraine, I decided to listen to mostly western symphonic music from mostly the 20th century. Surely, I thought, with all of the war and composers connected to war, I will find something to listen to. But frankly, I couldn't sit through any one of the pieces.

I listened to Britten's War Requiem, Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, Holst's Mars, and Karel Husa's  Music for Prague 1968, Schoenberg's Survivor from Warsaw, Ligeti's Kyrie, even some Shostakovich, but nothing captures the frantic blows of Putin's fist and the chaos and speed with which this destruction has unfolded.

This music is all too formal, too organized, even what used to seem so difficult to listen to. These organized compositions are too serene and intelligent and follow too many rules and take up too much time. 

What's happening in Ukraine demands something of an entirely different order. Formal music helps us to frame experience and contend with emotions that are too big, too complex or delicate or traumatized to manage coherently on our own.

The only music suitable for what is unfolding in Ukraine right now is the wailing of banshees and the cries and weeping of keeners.

There are so many distractions throughout the course of any normal day. Squirrel! The 62,000ish thoughts that we think each day! Things To Do! War! Anything and everything associated with our smart phones.

One of my most favorite scenes in Western Lit is when Will Farnaby comes to after being shipwrecked on Aldous Huxley's Island. As Will regains consciousness, he hears voices calling "Attention! Attention!" "Here and now, boys, here and now.", shortly discovering that the voices are trained mynah birds freed by an old rajah to remind the Island dwellers to stay present and pay attention.

One of the major reasons that I draw and teach drawing is that it helps me, and others, to practice being present.

You may remember an amusing Harvard study from a couple of decades back describing Inattentional Blindness. In a nutshell, this phenomenon describes what happens when we are so distracted by our thoughts that we miss out on obviously noticeable facts presented before our very eyes and was identified years before Blackberries hit the market.

Even though I've read, watched and listened to almost all of the explanations and warnings of what smart phones do to our brains and experience, I have become addicted and distracted by the damned things, too. I am taking slow steps to address this because I hate how difficult it has become for me to read a book and to contend with a brain that behaves increasingly like a flea.

This is especially annoying after having read and taken to heart works  from Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, to Jaron Lanier's 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, to Tristan Harris in The Social Dilemma, and so much more.

I was one of the last people I know to have purchased a smart phone. I put in a considerable amount of time at the MIT Media Lab, was an early blogger, and have taught online since 2011 so, obviously, I'm not a Luddite. I just found cell phone behavior to be highly annoying and the idea of carrying around a distracting device that removed people from their live environment and connections to be outright ignorant.

Then one day, I got lost. I was driving to a friend's new farm in the country, took a long wrong turn and had no idea where I was or how to find my way. The only place I could spot to pull over for directions was a dilapidated, rusting trailer at the end of a rutted, muddy drive. I did pull onto that property and was spared knocking on the door because the person living there came out to ask what I wanted. Directions. Directions that he did not know and could not give.

That's the moment I finally decided to buy an iPhone and I had one within the week. I wanted it for the GPS and emergencies. It's been a blessing and a curse and, frankly, a lot of little fun along the way. I love it. I hate it. And like any addiction, I want to use it, I don't want it to use me.

If you are suffering attention issues because, perhaps, of your smart phone, I highly recommend that you listen to Ezra Klein's interview with Johann Hari, the author of Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention - and How to Think Deeply Again.

The podcast interview is interesting and enlightening but I've got the audiobook queued up to listen to next. Here's the New York Times review of the book from early this month. That's worth a read if you're on the fence.

I'm going for a walk now to see what I can pay attention to in the woods. Then I'm going to sit down to do a daily drawing, right after I check my phone.

I've re-read some books from my youth over the past decade. Two of those, I passed along to my brother for his birthdays over the last couple of years.

The Light in the Forest by Conrad Richter and Rascal by Sterling North. Read or re-read both of these.

While putting the finishing touches on my new course, I listened to the audio version of Richard Powers' The Overstory. It's a commitment to read at 512 pages but also to listen to at 20+ hours. It's worth it if you have any interest whatsoever in trees.

I really wanted to get into another Richter book so now, I am listening to the audio version of The Trees. I don't know who reads Richter anymore but he writes with intimate knowledge of the beginnings of what has become the United States of America. Anyway, it's a good chaser for The Overstory.

I also recommend this sort of related NYT article if you suffer at all from any anxiety related to all that falls under the euphemism of climate change.

I've been re-watching some favorite movies, too. There are scenes in As Good As It Gets that I can watch over and over again without them ever getting old. Some of my favorite moments on film are those between Jack Nicholson and Greg Kinnear in this flick.

But what really slayed me earlier this week was watching The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Alan Arkin gives a master class in acting. It was the first movie that I ever went to see on my own at the Suburban Theater in Ardmore, PA. I'm sure that I cried. I did not realize until I just watched it again that James Wong Howe was the cinematographer. If you want to see a master class in black and white cinematography, watch what Howe does in Hud.

To wrap this up, I've been listening over and over again to Igor Zhukov play César Franck's Prélude, Fugue et Variation, Op. 18. It's a recording of a live performance from the Husum Festival in 1994. I've never heard another pianist bring out the organ in this piece like Zhukov does.

If you follow any of these links and listen, read, or watch, I hope that you enjoy or at least appreciate what I've shared.

Need a Fresh Start? Today is your day!

First of all, in the big astronomical/astrological picture, today marks the New Moon in Aquarius. Always a good time for new intentions, even more so than usual today. Mercury stations direct on the 3rd. A good time to start picking up the pieces and your pace from everything you may have recently been reviewing, reconsidering.

Down here on Earth, we are half way between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. In my ancestral tradition,  today is the festival of Imbolc, in some circles known as Saint Brigid's Day, which (among other things) many consider the precursor to Groundhog Day. Starting next year, a combo of the two will be an annual public holiday in Ireland.

Spring is getting closer every day.

But wait, there's more.

Today is the Lunar New Year on which Losar is celebrated, the Tibetan New Year (which goes way, way back to a winter incense burning custom of the Bon tradition). And, it's the Chinese New Year, one of the most important celebrations in China. Here's a good BBC article about the Chinese New Year: What is it and how is it celebrated?

And... we're back to astrology!

In the Chinese tradition, we now enter the Year of the (Water) Tiger. I was born in the year of the (Wood) Horse so, as the Horse and Tiger are 100% compatible, it could be a good year ahead for me! (Last year, I was only 20% compatible with the Ox.)

How about you? Do you know your Chinese Horoscope animal? If not, you can look that up on a fun calculator here.

In honor of this Chinese New Year, I've pulled out an old drawing of Zolushka (Cinderella), an Amur (Siberian) Tiger who was released into the wild after rehabilitation. Watch Zolushka being released and a glimpse of her first two cubs (now, she has four!).

If there were ever a good day to begin or to begin again, this is it.

Take advantage of this new moon to consider what you'd really like to unfold this year, set your intentions, and celebrate this fresh start.

龙腾虎跃 — May you soar like a dragon and leap like a tiger!

Bonus! I just remembered this from one of my most favorite albums, Paul Anka's Rock Swings.
Listen: The Eye of the Tiger.

David Hockney is many things. Artist, producer, showman, mover and shaker. And a very, very wealthy man. With a net worth at upwards of 40 million, Hockney is one of the top ten wealthiest visual artists in the world. Just a glance at the list of the top ten will reveal that he, like the rest of the list, is also a world-class huckster, but not in the pejorative sense of the word. It's a simple fact that if you want to make many millions as a visual artist while you're alive at this point in time in an all eclipsing capitalist society, you have to play a particular kind of game and you have to be very good at that game.

David Hockney is very good at his game.

In the Los Angeles of the late 1970s, when all things were possible, I rubbed shoulders with him once or twice at openings at the L.A. Louver. Although it doesn't matter what I think or thought of his work, I shrugged my shoulders at it for the most part.

It wasn't until I picked up a copy of his tiny book, Looking at Pictures in a Book, that he finally caught my attention. In case the title isn't the big clue, Hockney was writing about looking at pictures. Although I certainly don't know what he was up to in this department before that publication, this is when I began to appreciate Hockney as a teacher.

As these things happen, I found that book just as I was seriously amping up my practice as a teacher of drawing and watercolor. Shortly after that, he released Secret Knowledge, which I immediately ordered. That book, and the BBC TV film of the same title, describes an extensive project he tackled about his theory that, at a certain point, artists started using early camera techniques to aid their drawing. It's a controversial idea but I buy it. It holds up to me as someone who has used the camera, on and off in various ways, to aid my drawing over the years. It also holds up from my observation of students' efforts.

If you're familiar with Hockney's work, you'll know that he's flitted back and forth with the camera throughout his career.

Later, Hockney embarked upon another carefully documented project on the Yorkshire landscape when he was living in Bradford. Again, he made a documentary film about the project, A Bigger Picture. That's when I fell in love with David Hockney and bowed down to him as a great teacher.

Admittedly, I fell in love with him because, in addition to my own long-term focus on the subject of landscape, within that film are over the shoulder shots of him making watercolor landscapes and his work with a brush on paper is sure, confident, and superb. You wouldn't know that he has this skill by looking at his oils and acrylics or many of his drawings. Not that any of those are made without supreme confidence. It's just that with those other mediums, his results are most often more clunky and garish although there are plenty of exceptions considering his prolific output.

Another reason for surprise at his particular mastery of the watercolor medium is that earlier, he had publicly disparaged watercolor as "wishy washy" and "suitable only for Sunday painters". Not so.

For a present to myself last Christmas, I bought a copy of Hockney's A Yorkshire Sketchbook, hoping for some of those exceptional watercolors. I was, at first, disappointed because what it actually is is an exact reproduction of one of his sketchbooks from the project. It's messy and rapid and yet, once over my expectations, I found it to be a freeing thing. So often I belabor and criticize my "sketch" work as do most of us involved in making pictures by hand. But the fact is that a sketchbook, and all drawing and painting from life, is a process to help us see better. And that's what this sketchbook of Hockney's represents. He's just using the drawing and watercolor process to get the idea of what he's trying to get at. What he's looking at.

So, with all of that, I am truly surprised that in a general search through the web, I can find no reference to anyone writing or talking about Hockney as a teacher to anyone who's paying attention. There are plenty of teachers' aids for learning about Hockney but not about his role as a teacher. My bet is that, if there is a future that includes such things, he will be remembered as such. At least, that's how I perceive how he's used his life's work, aside from earning fortune, fame, and the power that comes with that. And that work and teaching includes how he's shared his knowledge of and experience with the history of painting.

Hockney's perspective on the history of picture making is exceptionally important because it is from a working painter's direct experience and not that of an academic art historian.

As you might imagine, I incorporate Hockney's teaching into my own teaching at a couple of appropriate points. Hockney's perspective and insight has considerably enriched my life  as a visual artist and I love to share that with students.

David Hockney is many things but my favorite is Hockney as guide to a bigger picture.

•
Slideshow of the 36 part work: Midsummer: East Yorkshire, 2004 watercolor on paper.
Another exhibit, another view.

While preparing for my upcoming membership course, I dipped into one of my most favorite books on drawing. I am so fond of this artist author and his teaching that I'm reprinting a post I published about him in 2010, from my Drawing America work. Enjoy!

Eric Sloane
1905 – 1985

"As far back as the early 1700s, many American artists began their careers as sign painters and I can see why. The pleasure of creating a piece of work necessary to the buyer is a satisfaction beyond that of the artisan who paints merely to decorate. Some of America's finest and most prized examples of folk art are antique trade signs and inn signs. The signs I painted on midwest restaurant windows, even on hotel rest room doors, probably gave me more artistic satisfaction than anything I might have accomplished in art schools. I still letter freehand as easily as I write script and still have profound reverence for classic lettering." --Eric Sloane

Sign painter, muralist, prolific author, illustrator, teacher, painter, meteorologist, Eric Sloane began life as Everard Jean Hinrichs in 1905. After his mother died, young Everard launched a string of runaway attempts until his father finally gave him the family Packard Roadster and twenty dollars. That car and twenty dollars got him as far as Ohio where he "set out on foot as an itinerant boy painter." Not much later, he'd earned enough to buy another car and broadened his prospects.

"Henry Ford had not yet invented the glove compartment, but I shared the seat of a Model T with a traveling office of paper and pencils, a dictionary, and sketching equipment." —Eric Sloane

After a stint in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with his own sign business, he changed his name.

"When I left Lancaster to wend my way afoot toward the west, I decided to create a new nom de plume and chose the name of my teacher [John Sloan] but added an e to the name of Sloan. I knocked off the first and last two letters of American, which left eric and headed westward as Eric Sloane." —Eric Sloane

Traveling through Taos, New Mexico, not much later, Sloane discovered his true purpose.

"Inspired by the eight-thousand-food view of sky, I had decided to make meteorology and sky painting a life's work and, after all, the best way for me to learn a subject has always been to write a book about it." —Eric Sloane

In this process, Sloane composed one of the great American books on drawing --

Lighthearted, with humor, Sloane starts with descriptions of cloud formations, then helps the reader see and understand  our view, and the dimensions of sky before laying out fun drawing instruction.

It's a personal favorite but only one of a stack of books that Sloane wrote and illustrated on skies and meteorology. These include Skies and the Artist, Look at the Sky and Tell Me The Weather, The Weather Book, For Spacious Skies, Eric Sloane's Book of Storms.

Like John Ruskin, Eric Sloane was most interested in helping people see and understand what they were looking at. His books on drawing, skies and weather help us understand. The rest of his books help us understand the history of America through the mind and hand of an artist and craftsman.

"My research finds that the difference between the early American and the man of today is a matter of awareness. The first pioneers were awake to the dangers and simple differences of the new world's Indians, sudden storms, diseases, wild animals, severe winters, droughts and all the hardships of the great adventure. They were conscious of each moment, magnificently aware of life.

"We today are lethargic, for so many things are done for us. And so we are robbed of the joy and satisfaction of awareness. We switch on lights with no idea of the source, turn a faucet with no idea of where the water comes from. Our clothing might come from New Jersey or Taiwan and even the source of our food is of no particular concern. Few of us know why we are existing and the country with its politics has become too big and complicated for individual awareness. My life's work by writing and painting has been to reawaken the original American consciousness, that quality which created the United States and abounded in earlier days." --Eric Sloane

Visit ericsloane.com