The terrain of the Adirondack Mountains is timeworn, wild, and so fully alluring. A serene quiet permeates the ambiance of this place---a boundless poetic thrum of wilderness---amid wistful songs from White Breasted Sparrows, a distant crackle of a limb dropping in the forest, or muffled clattering of stones down a mountainside chute. Needles of Balsam breezily blanket dark sphagnum earth, precipitating such a welcome, fitting fragrance. Rocks, and boulders the size of houses are clothed in antique patterns of lichens, mosses, and mineral stains. An elusive spectacle of feldspar crystals embedded in the ancient gabbro, glistening, scintillating turquoise, purple, rose, and gold, is nearly mystical---sunlit glimmering-color spots emanating from polished walls of pools purely translucent. The brooks and creeks are as lyrical as they are driven---from secret trickling runnels in the highlands to fluming ravines, cascading and flamboyant. Despite innumerable obstacles they course and drop, and become confluent tributaries, impelled by the draw of dramatic watershed topography. Being in seclusion, surrounded by myriad entrancements inherent in this refuge of crevasses and peaks, homage to backcountry involves great attentiveness, and the rewarding effort in the discovery of lavish, if not rare earthly wonders.
Climbing above tree line, ascending into environs of High Peaks tundra, this elevation gives rise to the affirmation of isolation for a painter in search of fortuitous qualities of light and form. Facing a vermillion sun with paint and panel, aerial profiles of distant ranges become luminous and magnificent. At dusk’s onset, there is just time to retreat down slopes and throw together a tent, though during nocturnal hours I’ve often remained on high, hurriedly glimpsing and reacting before palette chromes fade. Inhabiting summits at night, the suggestion of feeling remote and solitary atop dark and windy peaks is not so much a hardship but a metaphysical experience----at rest on smooth granite, donned in nature’s dust; settled in vivid dreams; waking as stars fade with first light of breaking dawn; rising to seize the evolving radiance of a new day.
The Adirondack hinterland is unto itself, and the act of painting in this preserve is earned and edifying. Engaging sublime bonds, perceiving its compelling grace, from memory or when venturing again across its borders, the wilderness of the Adirondacks is, for always, a homeland.
