MoonLight Magic #1

aka MoonLight for the Misbegotten, oil on canvas, 24″ x 30″    in the collection of Nancy Goodwin-Hegg

Another Moon painting created thirty years ago; one of the earliest, preceding by only a few months the painting featured yesterday. Inspired by a view I enjoyed for a brief period – spring through fall of ’81 – when I lived in Dayton by myself, before moving to Portsmouth the following May, wintering in Cape Neddick. Thanks to the beneficence of my dad’s first cousin Emily, I had experienced the pleasures and insecurities of living totally alone in the country, with neighbors visible in the distance, but out of shouting range. It was definitely an interesting, though brief, chapter.

Right across the road looking west from the old house where I lived was a hillock crowned with a cluster of oaks, surrounded by pasture, where cows rarely  roamed anymore. The remains of a stone fence laboriously built by yeomen living in centuries past bordered the pasture; with Juniper clinging to the rockier sections splayed across the field, where the granite thrust its shoulders through the  thin layer of earth. It was a view I grew to love, but Time and the River moved on, and I moved with it, though maintaining  a connection to family that ties me still to the earth from which I sprang. Here’s another view of that hilltop, seen in westerly light, in the collection of Clark Cole.

Monday – the Moon’s day – will feature another view of “my favorite hilltop” as seen in moonlight. Tomorrow Saturday, an invitation; Sunday, another invitation announcing the opening reception of the DaVinci Art Alliance’s holiday show that afternoon 1-4. In the meantime, “don’t let the stars get in your eyes…”

Moonlight Magic #1 was exchanged with fellow artist and friend Nancy Goodwin-Hegg for her wonderfully evocative painting Ravens over Plum Island, Newburyport, Mass