If you were to hike alongside the acequia on the North leg of Corrales, New Mexico on an early winter morning after the sun had sprung above the Sandias and you saw this giant, looming, rugged mountainous shape against the deep blue of the sky you might carry on for a few more steps before the incongruity of another set of rugged granite shapes comprising a more intimidating layer disrupted your notion of harmony and made you hesitate and look again. What?!   

You would find that there appeared not one but two undulating mountainous shapes one cowering beneath the other. A much darker form. Yet, if your sense insisted that it is one, the morning light is playing tricks on you.   

I, too, am sometimes fooled by the different shapes, lines, textures and colors of the Sandia Range depending upon morning or evening light. The steep, craggy western slope reads smooth, flat and grey blue in morning sunlight but changes in the afternoon to ornately sculptured granite sliced with volcanic fissures and colored with brilliant oranges and exotic reds. Which version to paint?  

I go back to my art studio when the thought strikes me that the two fractured volcanic uplifts, I observed from the acequia, were not part of a larger whole but formed two separate craggy highlands. It was just a hunch and I am no longer naïve enough to ignore hunches. Where does inspiration begin and impulse leave off? Maybe in the finished picture? I pick up my drawing pencils and watercolor brushes with the thought of trying to capture this conundrum.  

Why do I paint? Not being certain of what I have seen gives me a satirical pleasure of painting possibilities that are simply outside of my control just as the medium of watercolor cannot be forced to be something different than its unpredictable character. For me, I paint seeking to bring these odd fellows together in landscape scenes using the watercolor medium.