This view of Peyto Lake in Banff National Park is one my favorite vistas. The beautiful turquoise color of the lake is what drew me to visiting Banff. I saw painting of the lake at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and just marveled at the color of the lake and knew I had to go see it for myself.
The photograph I started with to make this painting is one of my favorites. Moraine Lake is incredibly picturesque and it took me three trips to Banff National Park to find it with out the peak covered by clouds.
Italian Benevolent Society Tomb, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, New Orleans
There’s so much history in cemeteries, much of it forgotten. New Orleans had multiple terrible yellow fever epidemics and malaria was endemic. It took large scale public health projects to eradicate these diseases. The CDC we have today originally was started to eradicate malaria.
We have forgotten that this country fought and won tough battles against diseases before. Maybe if we relearned this history, it would help us find the strength to beat the current pandemic.
The Haserot Angel, Lakeview Cemetery, Cleveland, Ohio
I started posting a daily picture from my archives since I couldn’t go out and take new photographs due to the shelter-in-place order. It was a way to remind myself that there’s a beautiful natural world out there, even if I can’t access it right now. But now we are at 80,000 dead from COVID-19, with no signs of it stopping. So, maybe cemetery images are a better fit for the current times.
The monuments in Washington DC present our great past leaders as larger than life. I’ve always been skeptical that great leaders shape history and have leaned towards the view that much of history was inevitable. Recent events have gotten me question this view. What if we had a completely incompetent president during the Civil War? Counterfactuals are always tough because it’s hard to account for all the variables. If a weak and ineffectual President was elected instead of Lincoln, the Civil War would have been later. One of the facts I forgot from high school history and re-learned later was that South Carolina announced its succession before Lincoln even took the oath of office.
Competent leadership matter. So I’m now thinking we should grateful that we had Lincoln and FDR when we needed them because a national crisis with a terrible president results in an unnecessary disaster.
