Rum Factory Pot Still

This is an old pot still used in the making of rum back in the nineteeth century. With its strange gooseneck this is a somewhat unusual-looking relic of the sugar-based argibusiness of the Caribbean’s past. The image is dark and muddy to reflect my feelings about that past and some of its effects on people that continue to be passed down through the generations,…

Point Udall View to Buck Island

Local tourism brochures advertise Point Udall on St. Croix as the easternmost point in the United States. The park and monument on Point Udall are on a high hill. This view looks back to the northwest along St. Croix’s north shore toward the iconic Buck Island in the distance. Although abstracted into a study in shape and color, the glowing attraction of the offshore…

Black Pineapple

Narrow and tall with a dark green skin, the black pineapple is a Caribbean favorite. Topped with rust-tinged leaves, this one seems to glow with sweetness.

The Changing Room

This image came from a little park on the beach nearby. There is a small building with changing rooms for swimmers, and a number of large rocks and boulders that have been painted bright pink, yellow and purple. The half door, the colored boulders and the play of the shadows under the eaves in the early morning light led to this abstraction.

Left behind

This thick pale-blue piece of glass was laying on the broken green pavement of a long-abandoned and overgrown tennis court. While greens are not always my favorite color, this was like finding a jewel in the trash — a bit of beauty in what has been left behind.

Colonial-era “Copper”

While enduring a stressful period in one of my other endeavors, it seemed a good time to work on what I hoped would be a peaceful landscape, a pretty picture. This was the result. The object in the foreground is a colonial-era artifact known as a “copper”. These large iron containers were used to boil down the cane juice in the production of sugar…

Giant Sucking Sound

It was Ross Perot who popularized the “giant sucking sound” phrase. Living on a Caribbean island we hear that sound sometimes. But in our case it is the sound of major off-island “investors” (a.k.a., developers) sucking the island dry of its fragile and scarce land resources — leaving behind a ruined landscape and a few low-paying service jobs, while removing the value of the…

Buck Island View 2

Thanks to Jane Hunt for giving me the blogger’s lemonade award! Jane paints contemplative heavily-textured acrylic landscapes. Check out her blog! Since I ‘ve just passed on a tag of another award, I will leave this one on countertop for a few days before sending it on to some worthy bloggers helpful to other artists. Instead, for today, I’ll share a new view of…

Visit of the Happy Fish

This guy stopped by the other night, stuck his nose into my private dungeon, smiled and swam off. I’ll probably never know what he wanted.

Locked Out/In

The ambiguity of a locked door… Which side is out and which in? Am I locked out to protect what is in, or locked into my world. Or is what is on the other side locked out to protect and keep safe what is on this side? There must be something important behind that door, but I’m not sure I want to let it…