This past weekend I traveled up north to Atlanta Michigan for an annual ice fishing trip with a few of my friends. We stay at my buddy Jason’s cabin while we are up there and it is just a little slice of heaven on earth. No cell phone service makes it the perfect place to just get away from everything else. The only “electronics” used are an old radio and a record player.

One of my favorite aspects of being up there is that the lighting always seems magical. Maybe its the way the light bounces through the trees, or because it’s so far up north. But what ever it is, the lighting is magical. I made it a point before I went up there to really soak in the different lighting and colors around me as I've been focusing my paintings on the subject of landscapes. This particular weekend we did quite a bit of snowmobiling so that allowed me to cover a lot of ground. My first afternoon up there I hit the trails on the snowmobile about an hour and a half before sun down. After opening up the throttle to jet out into an open field a top a bluff, I noticed the warm oranges and yellows from the late afternoon sun bouncing off the dead tall grass poking through the snow. Enhanced by red barns in the area that were also getting a great pop from the unique light of that time of day. As I cruised around the rest of the property, I couldn’t help notice these warm colors poking through the trees playing with cool colors tucked away in the forest shadows beneath tall pines and green cedars. I’m sure it was enhanced due to the fact that I predispositioned myself to notice these things, but the complement to contrast was breathtaking. The rest of the weekend was filled with similar experiences noticing color all around me in nature.

I didn’t want to try to take pictures of everything. I find that setting up the camera to capture the moment exactly as you see it can take away from the magic of the experience. I wanted to soak the experiences with color deep into my sole in hopes of letting it spill out onto the canvas some day. Wish me luck! And remember, magic is all around you.