My published work
Damp sanctuary of the rain forest
The western slopes of Washington’s Olympic Mountains receive more than 140 inches of precipitation a year — our very own rain forest clothed in somber hues of green.
Winter landscapes of Lopez Island
The San Juan Islands in winter have a gloomy beauty I love. The patchwork of gray-blue rocks and gray-green lichens calms the mind. Ravens croak from dense stands of rain-blackened firs, suggesting sad mysteries and ancient history.
Grandeur of the Gorge
In all my painting trips this year, I have not found an area to rival the Columbia River Gorge for demonstrating Washington state’s wild diversity. In about an hour’s drive through the gorge my brush moved across my palette from the blue green of fir-shrouded slopes to rich ochre mesas toasting in the sun.
On the waterfront
Basking in the warm sun, watching blue waves pound the beach, I occasionally reminded myself that I had a job to do, so I’d punch my brush into the mound of cerulean blue again and laugh. Not a bad way to spend a workday!
The art of travel
Travel is the act of moving about. I suspect I’m not the only one who has taken this definition a little too literally at times, having caught myself snapping vacation photos from a moving car.
It can be easy to fall into the temptation to try and see it all: pull over, snap some photos, grab a few post cards and scurry on to the next destination.
Yet the best memories I have from my journeys, the ones that come unbidden, are of when I haven’t been rushing onward, but have stopped to linger and look and appreciate.
Air Brush
On a windswept day I stand before my easel on a viewpoint overlooking Puget Sound with a fistful of brushes, smearing ribbons of paint as thick as cake frosting. Grunting with satisfaction, I eye the dark purple clouds I see tumbling across the gray sky and fill my brush again.
I love being out here painting. And I’m not alone.
Soul-warming alpine scenery
Perhaps each of us has a place that causes our soul to fire up and dance a joyful jitterbug. Those lucky enough to find that spot simply have to find an excuse to get there as often as possible.
Willipa in the mist
Successful outdoor painting, like successful traveling, can require us to rouse our spirits and spit in the eye of circumstance. One simply cannot allow fate or the elements to stand in our way.
Watercolor in winter
My 6-year-old daughter enjoys identifying her favorite ice cream, stuffed animal or best friend. Not long ago, she asked me what is my favorite season.
At first, I found it a difficult choice to make. But then I realized nothing gets my spirit soaring quite like tromping through deep snow in the mountains in winter.
Bullying along on snowshoes or skis, winter in the Cascades appears to me a chilly stew of paradoxes
Facing the force of St. Helens
I find it almost impossible to imagine the terrible power of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. The sudden collapse of the mountain’s north slope released an explosive force of 350-mile-an-hour winds, scattering rocks and flattening trees for nearly 230 square miles. Touring the devastated area is a humbling experience.
Al Hirschfeld is the one and only line king
Rodney Dangerfield is famous for the phrase, but ask any illustrator and they’ll assure you it is they who truly “don’t get no respect.” Illustrating is a tough vocation, and success is rare. Styles come in fast and vanish even faster. In the end, those of us who do manage to make a living at it find our work may be well liked but not valued. “Illustration is not art,” we are reminded.
Stay Loose With Tea
I purchased my first tin of unbagged, loose tea, a Russian Caravan tea, while still in my teens. The name conjured up groaning camels, Mongol hordes, steaming samovars. I made a cup. It was good tea, bright, lightly malty. While it certainly didn’t transport me to Russia, I began to see a life beyond Lipton.
Now, more than 20 years later, I’m at work, my wife is on the phone, and over what sounds like a Munchkin revolution I hear her tell me that a mom in her weekly toddler play group would like some green tea and my wife is wondering just how much of my Shao Mei to put in the pot.
“Not my Shao Mei!” I shout into the phone.
Dosewallips dabbling: a cool, flowing mix
Water is the stuff of life, but it seems bigger than life somehow. It can cleave stone; it can soothe and soften. It can be calm or raging, icy cold or boiling hot, murky or transparent.
For an artist, water is all that and more; it is constantly moving, reflects crazily everything on its surface, and appears to warp objects below its surface. It has more color, more light, more vibrancy than any pigments yet created. It shimmers, it shimmies.
It’s maddening.
Arid beauty of Vantage
A couple of Sundays ago, my daughter and I explored Schmitz Park in West Seattle. Beneath the dripping cedars were skunk cabbages, their yellow flowers lit by the flashing glimmer of Schmitz Creek and the plants’ odor mingling with the sounds and smells of running water.
A day later I was squinting under the blazing sun of treeless Eastern Washington near Vantage, surrounded by the dry, pungent smell of sagebrush and hot rock.
Ever-changing Palouse tableau
In art school, my teacher would gently tell me when I was drawing something the way I thought it should look by asking: “Are you drawing what you see?”
Twenty-five years later I’m still learning that lesson.
In the footsteps of Lewis & Clark
I had worked so hard waterproofing my moccasins; rubbing bear’s fat into the thick leather, sewing the seams tightly with deer sinew. But now I had a creek to cross. An icy looking rush that my imagination told me had been snow just that morning. The water was nearly knee high and my feet and legs would be wet through for the rest of the day. Yet there was nothing for it: I had to take that first step. After all I had volunteered for this, just as the men who had joined with Lewis and Clark.
A Czech Bounces Back
I have a recurrent dream in which I walk for miles in search of the Czech food of my grandmother, of my childhood. Christmas dinners of roast duck, dumplings with gravy, sauerkraut, creamy Bohemian Pilsners and the inevitable Vanocka, a sweet Czech Christmas bread. Forever thwarted, I wake up feeling an aching emptiness.
I think, therefore I am stuck.
Or, how I tell my brain to shut up so I can be creative.
Joseph Conrad once asserted that thinking is “…a destructive process, a reckoning of the cost. It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog.”
In my 30 years experience as a conceptual artist, I too have observed that more ideas come to me seemingly as a gift from my intuition rather than directly from mental effort.
In fact, I often think thinking to be a hindrance to creating.