St Cloud, MN

St Cloud, Minnesota__6x8 oil on linen panel___for Passing America exhibit in October 2011
This little sketch was painted just outside of St. Cloud, MN, while Passing America...it was almost midnight, the moon was full, but in and out of hazy clouds. The little farmhouse was blanketed with a recent snow, but the glow of the lights reminded me of the many nights I woke at our farm, to see lights on and tractors being moved for the day's work on our farm.
My southern eyes had trouble adjusting to these new colors of night in the great white north....Hey Rhonda, this is what "I saw" when I smooshed those three colors onto this first canvas of many! Of course I tweaked it when I got home. Thank you for being polite when I showed it to you before the tweaking!

I have been planning this trip for over a year, and now it's DONE! The "northern leg" of my Great Plains adventure came off without a (major) hitch, and was WAY MORE than I could have hoped for! Get ready, because I am about to post A LOT of works from this journey, and the great stories to go with them!
The sketch above was my first painting while passing this part of America. I flew to Minneapolis, MN last Tuesday, and my aunt Yvonne and cousin Jeff and his wife Tricia met me at the airport and brought me to St. Paul....what a WONDERFUL time we had, catching up on old family stories and telling NEW ones! (I have a very large Italian family, so we talked nonstop for about 5 hours and did not make a dent in the news!...I NEED TO GO BACK!) ...cousin Paul came to visit and I was in hog heaven, enjoying Italian food for both lunch AND DINNER that day!...After a little drama with my cell phone, Aunt Yvonne then brought me to the Amtrak station to meet an old buddy, Rhonda, and we took the 11:15 Empire Builder west toward Montana....I will continue the journal tomorrow...