i started this post in montecito where it was cool and misty this morning. now i am home and it is still cool and gray, but you know me, i enjoy these rare days when our star stays hidden far above the cloud shelf.
after nearly a week by the sea i headed back south to moss cottage. the coast was once again a swirl of fog, churning surf, and yellow hillsides.
blind contours are an important part of meetings with friends.
i love it when a rental has lots of books you want to browse through at a leisurely pace.
here are a few pics of the little place i stayed. hopefully there are no stray bras or dirty socks laying around!
yesterday i took a walk down the ennisbrook trail off san leandro lane. there is evidence everywhere of the terrible mudslide of january 2017. there has been a herculean effort to restore the area where so many lost their homes and their lives.
wildflowers are everywhere, new rock walls are being built, the 30 ton boulders have been relocated, the trail is walkable again. i saw many sycamores saplings growing out of bent and broken trunks.
montecito is slowly returning to a wonderland, but for the dear people who lived through the mudslide i imagine the knowledge of what tore through here and what could come again is ever present.
if you care to read more about the devastation that was wrought by the massive debris flow go here.
i was content to stroll beneath the overstory of oak and sycamore and think about how things recover and regrow.
here in montecito there has been a lot of that in the last 15 months.
i carried very few art supplies on this jaunt up north. a couple of sketchbooks – this one below with the sticker is always in my car and my landscape book. a couple of pens & brushes.
this palette represents my current set up. 1 row of gouache down the middle and the rest watercolors. everything’s a mess, but it works for me.
i bought this palette on amazon JUST for the palette – it was around 15 bucks. i took the watercolor bricks out and squeezed my watercolor tube paint in the spaces built into the palette. same old daniel smith tubes i’ve used for a long time now. the spaces are half-pan size. the empty space in the middle i filled with full pans of gouache.
