Ranches and Rolling Hills Art Show - 20th Anniversary 2017
January Morning-Gale Ranch, 15x30", oil
What a beautiful Spring we're having this year after all that much needed rain. The verdant hills and fields serve as a large and very fresh "salad bowl" for all the happy cows, sheep, and goats on the MALT ranches in West Marin in Northern California. This year marks the 20th Anniversary of the Ranches & Rolling Hills Art Show benefitting the Marin Agricultural Land Trust. It will be my 18th year as one of 36 participating artists that come together each year the third weekend in May to create one of Northern California's most prestigious art shows.
Spring at the Gale Ranch, 5x24", oil
This year I have spend quite a bit of time at the Chileno Valley Ranch owned by my friends Mike and Sally Gale. I have been ranch sitting on several occasions and this has given me some great opportunities to collect amazing subject matter for my paintings. Sally's Katahdin sheep are my favorite, especially since I have been helping to bottle feed some of the "bummer lambs", ones that the ewe refuses to feed for one reason or another. The bummer lambs become attached to humans and follow you around as if you were the mom. Last year there was Nutmeg who still remembers me, and he'll come up and want to say hi and have a good chin scratch whenever I visit. This year there's Alice, a beautiful white bummer lamb. Needless to say, one can't help but fall in love with these wonderful creatures. I always look forward to my ranch visits when I can spend time with the animals whether they be the chickens, dogs, cows, or sheep...and of course Mike and Sally too!
I truly look forward to creating paintings for the Ranches & Rolling Hills art show every spring. It gives me great satisfaction to be painting for a show that benefits such an important cause where 50% of proceeds from the sale of artwork will go to saving precious ranch land and guaranteeing that the protected ranches remain as they are, never to be developed. For more than 30 years, Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT) has worked with local families to save their farms and ranches. So far MALT has protected, as "farmland forever", 80 farm families on more than 48,500 acres of farmland.
Marin's farms provide delicious milk and cheese, meat, vegetables, fruit and wine to people in the Bay Area and beyond. With the public parks that surround them, farms preserve a contiguous open landscape that is home to abundant wildlife, verdant grasslands, sparkling streams and dense woods. Ranching families have faithfully cared for this working landscape for many generations, guarding an extraordinary place unlike anywhere else in the world.
For more information on MALT and the art show please visit their website: http://www.malt.org/art-show
Good Morning - Gale Ranch, 12x9", oil
