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This is one of those paintings that come from mining the treasures I collect and hold on to (sometimes for a very long time) before making them into paintings. 

The timestamp on the photo is December 2006.  I was coming home from hiking the hill near our house with our dog BJ.   As we walked by the house down the street, the lawn next to the sidewalk was strewn with the leaves from their liquid amber trees, iced with frost. 

My eyes landed on this one vignette of overlapping and turning leaves.  Even though this is not a rare occurrence, I’m still amazed at the wonderful mystery of how we are caught by something so specific within  a sea of visual information. It’s as if I hear “this, this, look at THIS!”

I dashed home for my little Canon Elf camera – this was pre-iPhone – to capture it before the sun came up enough to melt the frost.

Two forms of hesitation have kept me from painting it all these years:  first, how am I going to take on painting this?  All that frost!  And then:  who is going to want a painting of ice?  Most people are drawn to all the warmth and sunlight in my work.

But I appreciated the fire-and-ice quality to it – the warmth even in the cold.  So, there it rested, patiently, in my “candidates” folder. 

When the world shut down and we all stayed at home the spring of 2020, there were two more Saturdays on the schedule of a “Basics and Beyond” series I was teaching.  With the shift to Zoom, I felt compelled to come up with a new group exercise, since I couldn’t support each student working on a painting of their own choosing, as I do when we are in-person. 

I decided to use a piece of this image for the session called “Lost and Found in the Details.” In the process of demonstrating how I’d paint the multiple colors around the white spots of the frost, I found myself really liking the result – and having fun!

Adding to the impetus to do a full painting of these frosty leaves was the idea that came to me to create the 2021 calendar with paintings of images that were captured within walking distance from home – the beauty found right here in our neighborhood.

The name has a few connotations:  returning home from the hike, returning to capture the image of these leaves as they are returning to the earth at the end of the season.  We turn and re-turn. 

22”x22” – April 2020 – Watercolor on paper