The photograph I started with to make this painting is one of my favorites.  Moraine Lake is incredibly picturesque and it took me three trips to Banff National Park to find it with out the peak covered by clouds.

Digital Painting, National Parks

Moraine Lake (Painting)

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Statue, Recoleta Cemetery

Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2007

Travel

Recoleta Cemetery

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Italian Benevolent Society Tomb, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1

Italian Benevolent Society Tomb, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, New Orleans

There’s so much history in cemeteries, much of it forgotten. New Orleans had multiple terrible yellow fever epidemics and malaria was endemic. It took large scale public health projects to eradicate these diseases. The CDC we have today originally was started to eradicate malaria.

We have forgotten that this country fought and won tough battles against diseases before. Maybe if we relearned this history, it would help us find the strength to beat the current pandemic.

Travel

Italian Benevolent Society Tomb

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The Haserot Angel

The Haserot Angel, Lakeview Cemetery, Cleveland, Ohio

I started posting a daily picture from my archives since I couldn’t go out and take new photographs due to the shelter-in-place order. It was a way to remind myself that there’s a beautiful natural world out there, even if I can’t access it right now. But now we are at 80,000 dead from COVID-19, with no signs of it stopping. So, maybe cemetery images are a better fit for the current times.

Travel

The Haserot Angel

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Sunset, La Jolla

La Jolla’s coastline is just gorgeous.

California

La Jolla Sunset

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Delicate Arch, Arches National Park

Arches National Park, 2010

National Parks

Delicate Arch

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Joshua Tree at Sunrise

Sunrise, just after Thanksgiving 2011

California, National Parks

Joshua Tree National Park

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Lincoln Memorial

The monuments in Washington DC present our great past leaders as larger than life.  I’ve always been skeptical that great leaders shape history and have leaned towards the view that much of history was inevitable.  Recent events have gotten me question this view.  What if we had a completely incompetent president during the Civil War?  Counterfactuals are always tough because it’s hard to account for all the variables.  If a weak and ineffectual President was elected instead of Lincoln, the Civil War would have been later.  One of the facts I forgot from high school history and re-learned later was that South Carolina announced its succession before Lincoln even took the oath of office.

Competent leadership matter.  So I’m now thinking we should grateful that we had Lincoln and FDR when we needed them because a national crisis with a terrible president results in an unnecessary disaster.

Travel

Lincoln Memorial

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Inside of Jefferson Memorial

Thomas Jefferson was incredibly important as a founding father of the country. Hamilton is preeminent now in the public consciousness due to the hit musical but Jefferson was at least as important in shaping the country. Over the years, my view of Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian society has dimmed but that they may not be fair since today’s agrarian culture is profoundly anti-science and anti-intellectual which certainly wasn’t what Jefferson was envisioning. And Jefferson was also flawed particularly around the issue of slavery and his own conduct with the enslaved persons he owned. A combination of greatness and flaws is so far removed from our political leadership today which is quite depressing.

Travel

Jefferson Memorial

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