Arthur Dove

Arthur Dove, originally uploaded by macatay.

Arthur Dove, who made the painting called Thunder Storm shown here, lived for a time on a sailboat with the woman who became his second wife. I understand that it was quite a small boat, that it was difficult to stand up inside the cabin, and that they both tried to paint aboard.
I think of Arthur Dove and his passion for painting sometimes when I have trouble organizing the time and space to paint, or finding the image or imagination. We have days filled with glorious sea scapes, shorelines, and sunsets, yet nothing gets resolved into a painting. It's a tonic to look at work like Dove's, where the raw material of the natural world gets spun into something magical.