I’m not sure I have a secret: I use a lot of sap green as my basic green, but did the viridian studies just before I began these paintings, so that may have influenced me. Also I have a pigment called Perylene black that goes green when mixed with medium or white — a blue-green, that I use a lot for darker areas.

Maybe the key is having grown up with greens and living in Portland, Oregon, where one always deals with green. And more green.

I’m keenly aware of green right now because I just returned from the desert where the operative colors were beige. What a variety of beiges there are!!!

When I first begun to paint, I loved greens and your paintings just reminded me why I did. So tell me, what is the key to mixing these great shades of green and be consistent all the time?

I like what you said about abstraction: ‘It takes an inner clarity about what I’m doing or where I’m going or why I’m painting what I’m painting that requires insights hard to acquire and hold’.

And, I do hope that you will return to the haunts of your childhood to paint what is there. I has meant a lot to me to return to my German hometown so frequently at recent times to breathe the North Sea air and look at the mudflats and rich, green meadows.

Bid Jer fear not. Wellsboro awaits at the head of the gorge, and in it the Penn Wells Hotel.

Watch your tongue when you speak of Oregon. I’ve lived in Portland longer than I lived anywhere else, and I’m definitely a left-coast loyalist! Besides, the sun is shining and it’s proposed that it might get up to 50 degrees today. I don’t believe the latter, but the thought of it is a bit thrilling.

I haven’t been back to the Pine Creek Valley in at least 10 years — the last time was with my sister, in a snow storm that required that we stop at a number of watering holes to chain up, fuel up, eat up, and so forth. The scene, January in the fresh snow, was fairly magical, I’ll admit.

I would love to go back and paint, both the landscape and something of the small town where I went to high school. I think looking with a painterly eye at those old river-town buildings (what’s left of them) where my relatives lived and partied and died (and where my daughter was born) would be fascinating.

I don’t know if I could persuade Jer to leave his Wikipedia work long enough to get there; and I also don’t know if high speed internet has yet reached the wilds of the Pine Creek Valley. But maybe, someday (she said wistfully….)

Your trip memory almost certainly was to the Old Camp (across from Tiadaughton, on the west rim of the gorge) where my mother’s family farmed and fed loggers. And where I really established my memories of the landscape (as well as my distaste for rattlesnakes).

Thank you for your insights. They are valuable and I’m going to stash them close by. Tharp’s comments about “the wisdom of experience and the fearlessness of naivete” rings very true to me. In fact, I suspect one ofmy strongest points of personality is a that kind of fearlessness that comes from ignorance — not knowing, until I’ve been sucked in, just how bad those rapids are it is that I’m about to attempt to run.

My urban-scapes are more jittery, a bit more “unsure” or tentative, in part because of the circumstances under which they are being produced. Painting in the city has all kinds of adventures and trials which my studio lacks. I think that’s why I like it. Being a bit on edge is far more exciting than watching TV — or even painting in a nicely controlled environment — and I like a certain amount of this kind of “excitement.” But it’s also comforting to return to warm, quiet, thoughtful and stable painting situations.

I will play around with the abstraction possibilities — abstraction is far more challenging to me, in the holistic sense, than my representational work. It takes an inner clarity about what I’m doing or where I’m going or why I’m painting what I’m painting that requires insights hard to acquire and hold.

I could probably rank my working processes from easiest — painting from photos — to harder — painting urban-scapes plein air –to hardest — painting abstractions, whether abstracted from reality or totally mind-deduced. I like to move around within these comfort zones for the same reason I like going from the studio to the street — changing the environment keeps me fresh and excited about my work, while not stressing me to the point of giving up.

You don’t get back to Pine Creek much anymore, right? Seems it would be interesting to see what an easel powered take on your old ancestral hunting grounds would be like. I can remember a trip up to the edge of the gorge to visit a run down house in an overgrown field that had been home to some of your relatives: a lush setting if I remember. It would seem that the glories of Pa. remain with you regardless of the misbegotten, misshapen, pernicious and plain pug ugly influences of dire Oregon.