Mount Zirkel Wilderness, Routt County, Colorado (Watercolor Paintings)

Spring has been late in coming to Vermont this year. The week before last was cold, windy, snowy, sleety, and icy. I made the best use I could of time trapped indoors by finishing a series of watercolors based on sketches and memories made in Colorado last summer.The Mount Zirkel Wilderness Area and the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest landscape in NW Colorado captured my heart with its spaciousness, varied mountain ranges, its big skies, lakes and rivers. The six pieces below are intended to be a series. Taken together they express part of the story
this place has set in motion inside me.
                                                                                                                                                               

                                         

Paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor and graphite on paper, 2017-18)

Hinman Lake, July ( watercolor painting)

                                          Hinman Lake, July ( Clark, Colorado) 
                                     Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper, 2018

A steep climb, and then a trail through a paradise of aspens; trail meeting this shore in late-morning shadow, sun, sky, reflection. I swore I heard the ratcheting, resonant call of  a sandhill crane, but saw no birds when I scanned the sky.   Months later, looking at a photo I had taken that day, I noticed a speck in the sky that I thought might be the result of some dust caught on the lens. But a zoom-in revealed the shape: long neck and wings of a crane in flight.-KMB