8 November:

I am looking through a tomato vine hanging with ripe fruit at a world white with our first light snowfall. The garden has long been frozen but this plant sits in a 5 gallon container in front of my studio window. This morning I am enjoying the contrast of the red fruit against the white mountain slope beyond. For days I've been struggling to translate these tomatos onto canvas and now I think I've got it. The fruit has been sacrosanct while I finished the paintings, but now I look forward to this taste of summer for lunch.

13 November:

I have had company the last few days. He announces himself by knocking on the side of the house, then makes his way to the balcony outside the studio door. If I turn my head slowly I see the red head of a sapsucker bobbing between the balcony rails. He has now grown so bold as to look in the door. I wonder which of us is the most curious? Is he on his way to warmer climates or will he stay for the winter?

Cheers, Enid

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Trading Art

Artist Enid Petherick and I live in a remote part of the Canadian Rockies. The land is beautiful (from our living room we watch the changing shadows on a 3000 metre glaciated mountain), the life is challenging (I cut wood for three wood stoves - about 90% of it by hand!), and the rewards satisfying (we see more than our share of animals and have more than once had proud mother deer parade their days-old fawns past our house, with us sitting on our front deck watching them).

But there are a few drawbacks: It's two kilometers of skiing and two kilometers of walking to where our car is parked in winter; it's never the easiest place to earn money; and in winter the sun is so low and the mountains so high that for several months around Christmas our solar electric system provides enough battery-stored electricity to allow us to operate only one light in the house. But then if you have never used kerosene lamps...

Hoping to produce a small income, this summer we started PRIMITIVE HOSTEL (which you can find described at www.rockymountainhostel.com - if our daughter ever gets the website built!) and we hope to get reservations over the Internet (to say nothing of being able to check in more easily with Millennium!). But we don't have a computer and at present we use a free one in town. And besides Enid previously refused to learn to type (let alone keyboard!) because she was afraid that would give her a secretary's low wage instead of an artist's no wage.

But then we ran across a computer for sale that we liked the history of. But at this end of the winter money is short - we had just bought our winter's supply of groceries. So we offered to trade them a Millennium Giclee Artprint of their choice for the computer. After some negotiating they settled on an 11"x17" of Enid's "Resting Time". We were happy. We now have a fairly new computer with loads of memory and a good paint and draw program for Enid (and me) to practice on. And they seemed happy because after looking at the website they bought a second Artprint - an 11"x17" of Enid's "Red/Green Figurative". Now all we have to figure out is where to get the money to buy a sine wave invertor so we can operate the computer when the sun gives us enough power this coming spring!

Cheers, Ralph