Saturday Painting Palooza Vol.872

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Gran Canyon scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.


I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 8×10 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.


Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have now applied paint to some of the major elements of the scene. I really do like the brownish color of the buttes. More to come next week.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.


I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

The Orbanization of the Republican Party

I was glad to see that Zack Beauchamp made the same connection between Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Hungarian President Viktor Orban that I made a few days ago. This is a story that should be front and center in our political discussion today.

DeSantis, who has built a profile as a pugilistic culture warrior with eyes on the presidency, has steadily put together a policy agenda with strong echoes of Orbán’s governing ethos — one in which an allegedly existential cultural threat from the left justifies aggressive uses of state power against the right’s enemies.

Most recently, there was DeSantis’s crackdown on Disney’s special tax exemption; using regulatory powers to punish opposing political speech is one of Orbán’s signature moves. On issues ranging from higher education to social media to gerrymandering, DeSantis has followed a trail blazed by Orbán, turning policy into a tool for targeting outgroups while entrenching his party’s hold on power…

Orbán’s political model has frequently employed a demagogic two-step: Stand up a feared or marginalized group as an enemy then use the supposed need to combat this group’s influence to justify punitive policies that also happen to expand his regime’s power.

Beauchamp does a good job of making a direct connection between the moves by DeSantis on LGBTQ issues, higher education, social media, and gerrymandering to policies implemented by Orban in Hungary. But he left out Orban’s “procreation, not immigration” policies.”

Hungary’s “procreation, not immigration” policies have their roots in “replacement theory.” This doctrine holds that white women are not producing enough babies and Christian, western civilizations will be “replaced” through the twin forces of falling birth rates and increasing immigration. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, for example, has argued that “there are political forces in Europe who want a replacement of population” and has vowed to fight those who want “an exchange of populations, to replace the population of Europeans with others.”

In case you’re wondering where that one is headed in this country, take a look at this Ohio state legislator talk about the “opportunity” presented by forcing a woman to give birth when the pregnancy is a result of rape.

While Beauchamp does suggest that this “Orbanization” of American politics isn’t limited to DeSantis, he doesn’t really address the depth of the way it has been embraced on the right. However, almost a year ago Ben Rhodes outlined the steps Orban took in Hungary to consolidate his power. A lot of this is going to sound very familiar.

In his first term, [Orban] systematically worked to remold Hungary’s democratic institutions. Parliamentary districts were redrawn to benefit Fidesz [Orban’s party]. Ethnic Hungarians outside the country were given the right to vote. The courts were methodically packed with right-wing judges. Fidesz’s cronies were enriched and, in turn, members of the business elite funded Orbán’s politics. The government constructed a massive propaganda machine, as independent media were bullied and bought out and right-wing media were transformed into quasi state-media. Whereas Fidesz once had a foreign policy formed in opposition to Russian dominance, Orbán embraced Vladimir Putin and courted Russian investment and the corruption that went along with it…

[T]o justify his efforts, Orbán has skillfully and relentlessly deployed a right-wing populism focused on the failings of liberal democracy and the allure of an older national story: Christian identity, national sovereignty, distrust of international institutions, opposition to immigration, and contempt for politically correct liberal elites. Smash the status quo. Make the masses feel powerful by responding to their grievances…

After his first reelection, Orbán’s focus on the persecution of his enemies intensified. Political opponents, civil society, and independent media have learned to live with various forms of harassment, including ceaseless disinformation and legal threats. Hungary completed a fence to keep migrants out. Conspiracy theories about Soros evolved into a campaign used to justify everything, including onerous restrictions on civil society and sham investigations. Corruption mushroomed and became a backdrop of Hungary’s government spending. Hungary’s historical sins—including complicity in the Holocaust—were whitewashed, as prominent statues and revised curricula rooted Hungary’s future in right-wing aspects of its past.

The structural changes to Hungary’s democracy enabled this: Orbán was elected to a third term in 2018 with less than half the popular vote, yet he presides over all of Hungary’s levers of power like a colossus.

While DeSantis might want to quietly implement Orbanism in Florida as a stepping stone to the White House, National Conservatives are openly touting it as a way to ramp up the so-called “culture wars.” Nine months ago Tucker Carlson traveled to Hungary and paid homage to Orban. In less than a month CPAC – America’s most prominent conservative gathering – will hold a conference in Budapest with Orban as the keynote speaker. In other words, the Orbanization of the right is not a secret. It is precisely where the Republican Party in this country is headed. The threat could not be more clear.

Friday Foto Flog, V. 3.033

Hi photo lovers.

It has been a hot minute since I last was able to post much of anything photography-related. The joys of being swamped. This is an early spring photo I took about four years ago – more specifically, late March 2018. The blossoms always look so tentative around that time of year.

I am still using my same equipment, and am no professional. If you are an avid photographer, regardless of your skills and professional experience, you are in good company here. Booman Tribune was blessed with very talented photographers in the past. At Progress Pond, we seem to have a few talented photographers now, a few of whom seem to be lurking I suppose.

I have been using an LG v40 ThinQ for for about three and a half years. My original phone is gone. The back of the phone came off. Apparently the battery began to burst. I am using a replacement (thanks to insurance) that is identical. I need more time to research smart phones, especially at the high end. I prefer to get a device and keep it for four or five years. Most of my family seems to be gravitating toward iPhones, so I suspect I may eventually have to succumb and go to the Dark Side of The Force. Given the times we live in, my default is to delay any major purchases as long as possible. So, unless something really goes wrong with my current phone, I’ll stick to the status quo for as long as possible. Keep in mind that my last Samsung kept going for over four years (the last year was a bit touch and go). Once I do have to make a new smart phone purchase, the camera feature is the one I consider most important. So any advice on such matters is always appreciated. Occasionally I get to use my old 35 mm, but one of my daughters seems to have commandeered it for now. So it goes.

This series of posts is in honor of a number of our ancestors. At one point, there were some seriously great photographers who graced Booman Tribune with their work. They are all now long gone. I am the one who carries the torch. I keep this going because I know that one day I too will be gone, and I really want the work that was started long ago to continue, rather than fade away with me. If I see that I am able to incite a few others to fill posts like these with photos, then I will be truly grateful. In the meantime, enjoy the photos, and I am sure between Booman and myself we can pass along quite a bit of knowledge about the photo flog series from its inception back during the Booman Tribune days.

Since this post usually runs only a day, I will likely keep it up for a while. Please share your work. I am convinced that us amateurs are extremely talented. You will get nothing but love and support here. I mean that. Also, when I say that you don’t have to be a photography pro, I mean that as well. I am an amateur. This is my hobby. This is my passion. I keep these posts going only because they are a passion. If they were not, I would have given up a long time ago. My preference is to never give up.

McConnell’s Cowardice and Cynicism Won Him the Worst of All Worlds

The Senate minority leader could have gone to the mat to hold Trump accountable but now he has to kiss his ring.

The following in an excerpt from the forthcoming book, “This Will Not Pass,”, by Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns. Let’s take a hard look at it.

One person unbowed by the experience of impeachment, humbled not even slightly by the scolding he endured on the floor of the House and Senate, was Donald Trump.

In an interview the authors conducted with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in the spring of 2021, the former president expressed utter confidence in his control of the Republican Party and waved away the criticism he had drawn from both the party’s legislative leaders.

McConnell, he said matter-of-factly, “is bad news.” “Had Mitch stuck with many members of the party who knew the election was rigged, I think we wouldn’t be at Mar-a-Lago,” Trump said, clinging to the fantasy of a stolen election. “We would be at the White House having this conversation.”

Trump made this statement about a year ago. He said that his coup would have succeeded if Mitch McConnell had been willing to help. Whether that’s true or not is hard to say, but a “successful” coup would have also come with a civil war, since 81 million people voted for Joe Biden, and a decent percentage of them would have fought violently against his illegitimate and illegal denial of office.

Of course, the reason Trump wasn’t convicted is because Mitch McConnell discovered that there weren’t enough Republican senators in his caucus willing to convict him and he wasn’t going to stick his neck out in an effort to change their minds.

“I didn’t get to be leader by voting with five people in the conference,” Mr. McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, told a friend.

As a result, he decided to hide behind the theory that a president cannot be impeached if he’s already left office. It was a cowardly decision, especially when you consider how he really felt.

Late on the night of Jan. 6, Mr. McConnell predicted to associates that his party would soon break sharply with Mr. Trump and his acolytes; the Republican leader even asked a reporter in the Capitol for information about whether the cabinet might really pursue the 25th Amendment.

When that did not materialize, Mr. McConnell’s thoughts turned to impeachment.

On Monday, Jan. 11, Mr. McConnell met over lunch in Kentucky with two longtime advisers, Terry Carmack and Scott Jennings. Feasting on Chick-fil-A in Mr. Jennings’s Louisville office, the Senate Republican leader predicted Mr. Trump’s imminent political demise.

“The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us,” Mr. McConnell said, referring to the imminent impeachment vote in the House.

McConnell changed his tune and even recently said he would “absolutely” vote for Trump in 2024 if he is the Republican nominee. But Trump could have easily been made ineligible to be the nominee if the Senate had convicted him. McConnell’s reward for giving Trump a pass is that he is blamed for not helping create a civil war based on lies (this counts against him in Republican politics), and he has to pledge to support Trump in a bid for another term if the “son of a bitch” is successful in the primaries.

In an alternative universe where McConnell went to the mat to hold Trump accountable, he still might have failed. Yet, he’d at least have something to show for it, like his integrity and reputation in posterity. Instead, all he got was the worst of all worlds.

Why I Am So Demoralized

We can tell you what happened on January 6, but we can’t make you care.

If I’m introspective, I’m willing to admit that the reason I am not churning out articles like William Saletan’s latest piece for The Bulwark is because is because I’m demoralized. I’m reading all the court filings and book-teasing revelations and leaked texts and emails that are filling in the blanks of the January 6 conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election. I’m putting the pieces together in my mind. But I’m not very motivated to tell the story because it’s all stuff I already knew in my gut, and that you probably knew, too.

Saletan is focused on former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. We now know that Meadows was apprised, usually in near-real time, that his boss’s favorite election conspiracy theories were complete bunk. Yet, he didn’t object when Trump and his allies repeated them over and over and over again. In fact, he helped Trump spread these lies and pressured officeholders, like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to take them seriously.

Here’s the thing. Most elite politicians in our country are not complete idiots. These people never believed Trump’s election lies. All the revelations we’ve seen in the past week about Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy being enraged about the January 6 coup are not actually revelations. Their fury with members of their own caucuses who had whipped up a deluded and violent mob which then assaulted the Capitol was based on their firm understanding that it was all based on complete bullshit. There were true believers in their caucuses, and they thought they were dangerous and should perhaps be removed from social media just as Trump had been in the aftermath of the riot. If we didn’t already know this in every detail, we could easily surmise it.

But we also knew that they stopped Trump from being impeached and prevented from running for office again. We knew that they obstructed the effort to have an independent commission investigate what happened, and that this was in large part because they knew the investigation would implicate many members of their caucuses. Their other motivation was their sad realization that holding Trump accountable was the last thing the party’s strong supporters wanted to see. If they went to war with Trump, they were likely to lose their positions of power.

I don’t know why Mark Meadows didn’t resign rather than deciding to help Trump try to illegally stay in power. But I have always assumed it was because he was trying to protect his own position. If he resigned, he’d be a nobody, but if he remained loyal he’d have a future. And if the coup succeeded, he’d remain the second most powerful man on the planet, serving as the gatekeeper of the Dictator of the United States.

So now we have some solid evidence that Meadows probably wasn’t a true believer in The Big Lie he was spreading. That’s worth something and it might even be prosecutable. But it really only confirms what I already felt was the most likely story. It doesn’t feel like news to me.

But I also feel this way because it’s been drummed into me that the truth alone isn’t going to prevail here. The problem isn’t that more people need to be convinced of what happened, but that people need to be convinced to care. I can explain what happened but I can’t make people care.

I have written countless times these people are fascists and a serious danger. I have begged and pleaded for them to be hauled off to jail, and for their crimes to be treated as sedition, akin in every way to the Confederates. This isn’t about convincing people with arguments and evidence but showing them with action and convictions–the exercise of power and justice to reestablish vital norms.

Mark Meadows is just as guilty as Jefferson Davis, and this is true whether or not he actually believed that the election was stolen. That he did not believe it isn’t exculpatory in the slightest.

We need people to defend our system of government rather than just talk about it. It’s not just McCarthy and McConnell who dropped the ball here. January 6 was the culmination of the biggest crime spree since the Civil War, and we’re not treating it that way. That’s why for every supposedly important story about January 6, there’s a story about how the Republicans-the perpetrators of the biggest crime in a century and a half–are about to win back the House of Representatives and probably the Senate.

That’s all the evidence you need that accountability isn’t working and our future is not being secured.

National Conservatives Are Openly Embracing Fascism to Fight the Culture Wars

I didn’t initially write about Governor DeSantis signing the bill to punish Disney World because I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on. What confused me went beyond the headlines to items like this tucked away at the end of articles about the legislation.

“Nothing is going to happen,” said Jason Pizzo, a Democrat who represents the state’s 38th Senate district, during the special session Wednesday. “Everyone in this room knows this is not going to happen.”

The revocation of Disney’s special district doesn’t go into effect until next summer and obviously there are those who know the details and are suggesting that this is nothing more than another performative stunt being pulled by a Republican governor. In other words, DeSantis gets to brag about being a true fighter in the culture wars, but the receipts never come due.

But then I started reading about those on the right who are referring to themselves as “national conservatives” (NatCons). In writing a taxonomy of that group, Matthew Continetti describes them as “post-liberals.”

The post-liberals say that freedom has become a destructive end-in-itself. Economic freedom has brought about a global system of trade and finance that has outsourced jobs, shifted resources to the metropolitan coasts, and obscured its self-seeking under the veneer of social justice. Personal freedom has ended up in the mainstreaming of pornography, alcohol, drug, and gambling addiction, abortion, single-parent families, and the repression of orthodox religious practice and conscience…

The post-liberals say that the distinction between state and society is illusory. They argue that, even as conservatives defended the independence of civil society from state power, the left took over Hollywood, the academy, the media, and the courts. What the post-liberals seem to call for is the use of government to recapture society from the left.

For all the talk of “freedom” on the right, these folks don’t think that’s a good thing. Continetti wrote that the elected official who best captures this thinking is Sen. Josh Hawley, pointing to a commencement speech he gave at Kings College in 2019.

For decades now our politics and culture have been dominated by a particular philosophy of freedom. It is a philosophy of liberation from family and tradition; of escape from God and community; a philosophy of self-creation and unrestricted, unfettered free choice.

Hawley actually made the twisted argument that being free to define one’s self leads to hierarchy and elitism…I kid you not!

According to these folks, it is imperative that the government be used to “recapture society from the left” in order to address all of the ills brought about by both economic and personal freedom.

About the time Hawley gave that speech there was a dust-up between Never Trumper David French and NatCon Sohrab Ahmari that was all about shaping the post-Trump conservative movement and the GOP. The position of Ahmari and his cohorts is that conservatives like French have been too “civil” in the culture war.

Yes, the old conservative consensus paid lip service to traditional values. But it failed to retard, much less reverse, the eclipse of permanent truths, family stability, communal solidarity, and much else. It surrendered to the pornographization of daily life, to the culture of death, to the cult of competitiveness. It too often bowed to a poisonous and censorious multiculturalism.

Ahmari’s alternative is “to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.”

James Pogue recently published a piece about attending the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando last fall (which is where Hawley gave his speech on the threat to masculinity). In it, he describes some of the leaders of this movement. The billionaire funder is Peter Thiel, who once wrote that he no longer believes that “freedom and democracy are compatible.” The so-called “intellectuals” are people like Curtis Yarvin, and, or course, Ahmari. Here’s part of how Pogue described the “thinking” of Yarvin:

[T]he way conservatives can actually win in America, he has argued, is for a Caesar-like figure to take power back from this devolved oligarchy and replace it with a monarchical regime run like a start-up. As early as 2012, he proposed the acronym RAGE—Retire All Government Employees—as a shorthand for a first step in the overthrow of the American “regime.” What we needed, Yarvin thought, was a “national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator.” Yarvin now shies away from the word dictator and seems to be trying to promote a friendlier face of authoritarianism as the solution to our political warfare: “If you’re going to have a monarchy, it has to be a monarchy of everyone,” he said.

Thiel is currently bankrolling the senate candidacies of his former COO Blake Masters in Arizona and J.D. Vance in Ohio. Because Vance wanted to talk off the record, Pogue retrieved this from a podcast interview Vance had done with Jack Murphy, the head of the Liminal Order men’s group.

“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” he said. “And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.”…

“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

As an example of what Vance is referring to, he once talked with Tucker Carlson about seizing the assets of charitable groups like the Ford Foundation. Of course, doing that to institutions simply because they are on the other side of the culture wars would be, at minimum, unconstitutional, and perhaps even a crime. So ominously, Vance suggested that he would simply ignore the courts.

All of this shines a whole new light on what DeSantis is doing to Disney World. He seems to have lined up with the National Conservatives. It’s also in line with what 18 Republican House members did to threaten Twitter’s board when they initially balked at accepting Elon Musk’s offer to buy the company.

Charles Sykes is absolutely right that none of this has anything to do with populism. But it also isn’t simply about grievance. It is about turning what we’ve come to casually refer to as “culture wars” into an actually war for power. Jonathan Chait got this one right.

This is one way rulers like Orban and Putin hold power. It is a method that, until quite recently, would have been considered unthinkable in the United States. That bright line has been obliterated.

While the National Conservatives have quieted down their admiration for Putin since he began his genocidal campaign in Ukraine, they’re openly touting their admiration for Viktor Orban. Here’s Rod Dreher, one of the leading voices of NatCons.

The call now among some Republican commentators for the state to take action against Disney, to revoke its special privileges on copyright to retaliate for its indoctrination of American children, is a pure Orban move. We need to see more of it. Republicans have been so prostrate before Big Business that they have sat there like idiots while Woke Capitalism organizes to turn conservative values of faith and the traditional family into pariahs among the young. Either we on the Right will learn from Viktor Orban how to use politics to fight this, or we will be defeated.

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t tend to be an alarmist. But in my 60+ years on this planet I never would have envisioned that we’d be hearing fascist talk like this coming from politicians and political commentators in the United States of America. It is terrifying. If you’re not seeing the makings of Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale, then you’re not paying attention.

It is beyond time for all of us to take stock of what is happening in our country. We must stand up, speak out, and vote like our lives depended on it…because they do!

The French Results Are Welcome But Not Reassuring

In the 1930’s, the center held in Germany, too, before it collapsed.

I most definitely understand Steve M.’s frustration with headlines and analysis that treat French President Emmanuel Macron’s 17-point victory over fascist Marine Le Pen as a win for the fascists. But maybe that analysis is prescient.

The German parliamentary elections of 1930 were notable, in retrospect, less for the performance of the winners than the losers. In brief, the center-left Social Democratic Party of Germany did the best but lost ten seats. On the theory that “a win is a win,” the SDP had a good night and had every right to celebrate. In the midst of the chaos caused by the Great Depression, which struck harder in Germany than anywhere else, it was an accomplishment for the lead party of the coalition government to maintain its position at nearly full strength.

But, today, no one thinks much about the SPD’s 1930 victory parties. That’s because the elections saw the far left and the far right improve their position, and this turned out to be the most significant development. The Communist Party added 23 seats and the Nazis gained ninety-five, which was good enough to make them, respectively, the third and second largest parties in the Reichstag. In other words, the establishment center held, but the radicals became the main opposition.

When the majority could not govern effectively, the alternative was a disaster of world historical proportions.

Federal elections were held in Germany on 31 July 1932, following the premature dissolution of the Reichstag.[1] The Nazi Party made significant gains and became the largest party in the Reichstag for the first time although they failed to win a majority. The Communist Party increased their vote share as well. The two parties jointly controlled a majority of the seats in the Reichstag, meaning no majority coalition government could be formed without including at least one of them.

There was a second election in November 1932 in which the Communists did even better, the Nazis modestly worse, but you probably know what happened next.

The Hitler cabinet was the government of Nazi Germany between 30 January 1933 and 30 April 1945 upon the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of the German Reich by president Paul von Hindenburg.

Looking back, the real winners of the 1930 elections were the Nazis because it positioned them as the top contender to take power if the victorious coalition faltered, which it did.

Now let’s look at that analysis that is irking Steve.

In an American context, this would be a tough sell. The last time a presidential candidate lost here by 17 points or more was 1984, when Ronald Reagan was reelected in a 49-state landslide. Absolutely no one wrote that Walter Mondale’s Democratic Party had edged a step closer to victory, and not only because it had done worse than in 1980. It was just a flat-out beating and and it immediately caused the Democrats to rethink their approach to everything.

The situation in France is, unfortunately, more akin to Germany’s experience with the Nazis.

With 41.5% of the vote, unprecedented for her, Le Pen’s anti-foreigner, anti-system politics of disgruntlement are now more entrenched than ever in the psyche, thinking and political landscape of France.

Since the Le Pen dynasty — first her dad, Jean-Marie, and now Marine, his daughter — first started contesting presidential elections in 1974, never have so many French voters bought into their doctrine that multicultural and multiracial France, a country with the words “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” inscribed on its public buildings, would be richer, safer and somehow more French if it was less open to foreigners and the outside world.

That the disaster of 1932 might have come in 1930 is of no comfort. What matters is that the disaster came. The best analysis of the 1930 results would have warned of this, and that’s why the results from France are cause for relief but also the severest trepidation.

It’s also applicable to America, because the Republican Party is now poised to govern this country, first in Congress and then in total, and it is at least as radical as Le Pen’s National Rally Party. It should be remembered that the Republican Party held onto the White House in 1988 but lost it in 1992. When there is only one alternative party to the one in power, that alternative party will be charge before very long. At least in France, there’s a better chance that a new or different party will rise as the main opposition to Macron. Here in the States, the GOP will probably not be displaced.

So, yes, I am extremely relieved that Macron defeated LePen, particularly at this moment with the war in Ukraine raging. We need a strong France, not one bent on fascism and far too close to Russia. But I don’t think it’s wrong to look at the results in France, where the National Rally Party just achieved a new record for support, and to have a bit of a panic attack.

Trying to Wake the World to the Perils of Climate Change

An environmental activist self-immolated on the steps of the Supreme Court to raise awareness of climate change. Did you notice?

Wynn Alan Bruce planned it for at least a year, and on Earth Day he followed through and lit himself on fire in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. He died of his injuries. He’s at least the second person to self-immolate in the last few years in the hopes of awakening mankind to the perils of climate change.

I sincerely do not want this to become a trend, in part because I really doubt that it will work. At the same time, anyone who is willing to lay down their life to try to save countless other lives deserves acknowledgement. If it doesn’t work, it won’t be because I refused to give it any attention.

Colorado photojournalist Wynn Alan Bruce, 50, suffered critical injuries in the incident at 6.30pm Friday on a plaza in front of the court. He was airlifted to hospital, where he died Saturday…

…Dr K. Kritee, a Buddhist priest from Boulder, wrote on Twitter that Mr Bruce had been planning to self-immolate for at least a year.

“This guy was my friend. He meditated with our sangha,” she said.

“This act is not suicide. This is a deeply fearless act of compassion to bring attention to climate crisis. We are piecing together info but he had been planning it for atleast one year. #wynnbruce I am so moved.”

I won’t praise this act or encourage others to follow his example. But I’d like you to contemplate why he thought it was necessary.

Saturday Painting Palooza Vol.871

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting a new painting. It is a Grand Canyon scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.


I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 9×9 inch canvas panel.

I started my sketch using my usual grind, duplicating the grid I made over a copy of the photo itself. I have added some preliminary paint.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.


I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.