I was glad to turn over the calendar page from October to November: not because October was a bad month (it wasn't, at all), but because October's picture was one that just didn't work from a distance (and was fairly boring close up). But the distance thing is hard to judge until the calendar's all printed up and one can pace away from it. But November ... suitably gloomy, but nicely so: it's a corner from the big cemetery in Genoa. Time, soon, to be assembling the pictures for next year's calendar ...
Here in New Mexico, my desk faces a cork pin board (with some paintings above it, and to each side). The window is to my left, so I can see the Sandias and the Cerrillos Hills with a slight turn of the procrastinating head. This is a configuration that just wouldn't work in LA, where I look straight out of the window: otherwise, there would be a complicated navigation of where to put furniture so it doesn't block the heating/ac vent, and so on. But I get to gaze on visual inspiration and solace, which of course periodically gets changed around: I see Ruskin (rather a lot of Ruskin, actually); Turner; Whistler; late C19th interiors; Ojibwe wampum beads; a photo of a rose from the garden at 20 Hillside ...) - I feel happily grounded when I look at all of these.
