New: “Lavender Ridge” 18 x 18

Distance makes things blue. It’s got something to do with the wavelengths of color. Years ago, when my son was 5 or 6, he and I went to hike in the Monadnocks of New Hampshire…a half hour west of here. As we drove the winding Route 101 up into the hill country, he saw Pack Monadnock (our destination) in the distance, and said “I wanna hike the blue mountain!” I said that’s where we’re going. When we got there, he excitedly hiked the trail, always a few steps ahead of me. At the top, he looked around disappointedly and said “it’s not blue!” Bringing up wavelengths wasn’t going to appease, so I pointed to the landscape back towards our neck of the woods and said see how it’s blue over there? That’s where we live, and you know it’s not blue where we live, right? He said right and appeared to accept my grownup logic as an answer, but I could tell he didn’t buy it. The color of nature is a mystery at times, the way light and atmosphere distort the reality of what we think the color of a thing is. “Lavender Ridge” 18 x 18.