Progress

The house is temperate, despite the twenty-below weather, outside. I’ve missed the unforgiving manner in which life continues with an almost detached certainty of cold. Yes. Nearly a foot of snow, now, with drifts taller than my youngest son. It is scheduled to start again; at any moment – the eastern blowing momentum of snow and ice strained through a sieve before pelting glass and wood and pressed-aluminum.

The canvas is stretched and primed. The painted sketches, which I typically ignore in my madness to build deposits and sheets and layers of pigment, are nearly to a state of finish – something a sketch should never confusingly reach. The abstracted Hutterite half-truths need permanent visual explanation before they are buried with the short stories, biographies and landscapes that are lost among my memories of Southwestern arroyos, Southern deltas and previous Rocky Mountain winter blazes.

I may eventually consider sleep, if I can continue to deny this urge to step out into the dazzling midnight snow and cross the sixteen or so feet from the mud-room door to my awaiting studio. The wind chill will reach negative fifty, within another two hours.
-North