Range, Divide, and Endless Sky, a novel.

 I am thrilled to announce that my eleventh novel, RANGE, DIVIDE, AND ENDLESS SKY., is available now.
  After two sojourns in Routt County in northwest Colorado I knew that I needed to write about this beautiful, powerful place. Of course I needed to paint it as well, and as I did so an idea began to make take form, taking shape as the story of an artist who comes to the region to paint and explore in the 1930s. 


Below are a couple of excerpts, for any who would like to sample the story:

Chapter One

              If you are fortunate in life, you will know what it is to have a particular mountain, with all the land, water, and sky it surveys, haunt your dreams and memories.

Wait… Let me write that again.

 you are unfortunate in life, you will know what it is to have a particular mountain, with all the land, water, and sky it surveys, haunt your dreams and memories.

  The mountain can bring beauty and inspiration: the power to lift your soul, your imagination.

  The mountain can also bring pain and suffering: the power to break your will, destroy your body; to bring misery and death.

 The particular mountain that haunts my horizon now is known as Hahn’s Peak. Before it was given the name of the man whom it helped destroy, it was known to trappers, explorers, and wanderers here in northwest Colorado as “Old Baldy”.

 The Indians in this country, the Utes, might have their own name for it, but I have yet to learn it. I do hope to know that name some day, and even speak it myself. There’s so much I’ve yet to find out about this place, and that’s just one example.

 I will try to describe the mountain with words, though it will take me some time, I think. I’m a painter by trade and calling, an artist. I describe best with line and color; with brush and wet pigment and the carefully preserved white of the paper. And painting was what brought me here to this wide and quiet wilderness in the high country near the Continental Divide, brought me here to live within sight of the mountain called Hahn's Peak......

.              

Chapter Two

It all started with a shave, a haircut, and a new Stetson hat.

There’s nothing quite like the feeling that comes with a fresh shave and haircut in town after you have been two weeks alone in the mountains. Add to that the feel of a stiff new fur-felt hat with a high crown, a broad brim to keep out the sun and rain while letting the cool breeze stir against the back of your neck—-well, maybe you get the idea of just how fine I was feeling.

I stepped out of the cool leather-and-felt mercantile smell of F.M. Light and Company, into the late-morning sunshine of Steamboat Springs, my new hat clamped down tight on my head. That sun was strong, but I was ready for it now. That cool breeze did its job on the back of my neck, right where the barber had splashed me with bay rum and dusted me with talc. I looked out at the clean streets and brick and wood buildings of town, the cars parked and shining in the sun, the big masses of mountains rising blue-black, streaked with remnant snow, that ringed the town.

“Good morning, cowboy.” The burr-throated female voice made me turn my head. Ursuline Kelley grinned at me. She had her hands in her dungaree pockets. Her green eyes glinted, even beneath the shade of her beat-up hat.

Let me make it clear that I would no way pass for any kind of cowboy, and that despite the Stetson. My eastern boots and paint-spattered pants were just the first things that gave me away, I’m pretty sure.

“Would you care to buy me a cup of coffee?” she asked.

Ursuline was for sure the forward type. Easy to get along with. But maybe not so easy to figure out.

“Hoped to—umm, had a feeling—I’d run into you,” she said, “It being the ranger’s day in town. Got something I want to show you.” She tapped the toe of a riding-heeled boot against a curbstone. “Over coffee.”

I had all day. Well, until four o’clock when I’d be meeting the ranger for a ride back to the Reserve with the supplies I’d be buying today. I had an order of watercolor cakes and papers to pick up from the stationers; groceries to purchase and pack back to the cabin. None of that would take a whole day.

And I bet you can guess that after two weeks alone in the mountains and another two weeks likely ahead of me, I was not at all averse to having a cup of coffee or two with Miss Ursuline Kelley.....

excepts from RANGE, DIVIDE, AND ENDLESS SKY, by Kevin Macneil Brown

You can purchase a copy here:

https://www.amazon.com/Range-Divide-Endless-Kevin-Macneil/dp/1096853795/ref=sr_1_1?crid=AK0PJF265QIC&keywords=range+divide+and+endless+sky&qid=1570792775&sprefix=range+divide+%2Camazon-devices%2C157&sr=8-1

Depth of Place (new paintings)

I've written before about what I call depth of place: the resonance of sky, water ,landforms, weather, memory. There are certain places that, once experienced, might make their own inner harmonies and mysteries sound inside me. These are the places I cannot help but paint over and over again- KMB

                                                  Lake Champlain, changing skies

South Fork River, NW Colorado

Summer stillness, Hinman  Lake (2)

Paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor and gouache on paper, summer 2019.

Morning Sky, May

                                            Morning Sky, May 24- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
                                          watercolor and gouache on paper, 2019.



                   The sky and light of late spring in Vermont can offer change and surprise. Here is a moment caught just after 7 AM, with wind and rain moving through and sudden breaks in the clouds bringing splashes of light to the new green on the hills.

range and divide (with endless sky) - New Music

   Continuing my inner resonance with the mystery of high peaks and big sky, this soundscape composition works with material made with steel guitar back in October of 2018, later shaped and altered digitally to create texture and harmonic haze.
 The shape and sound of this piece had been hovering in my mind for months, and in January of 2019   I awoke from a dream wherein I had heard--and seen-- it complete.
 That morning I sketched the score/map shown here,  and used it as a guide as I made the piece, which was finished and recorded in February.
- KMB

Mountains, again....

This winter I have been focusing much of my painting time on mountains. The shapes and textures, the mystery and science of the way they change from day to day in different light and shadow continue to hold me in thrall.
 Along with a few recent watercolors of mountains in both Vermont and Colorado,  I'd also like to share an excerpt from my latest novel-in-progress. The words below are in the form of a journal entry by the book's narrator and protagonist, an artist named Euclid Lane who has, in the 1930s, come to paint in the high country of Northwest Colorado.

Paintings by Kevin Macnieil Brown, watercolor and graphite on paper, January 2019.

It’s a struggle, sometimes, to keep certain aspects of the painting in balance. The urge is to paint what you see. But then there’s that other urge, sometimes just as strong, to paint what you know.

The thing is, what you see and what you know do not always agree.

You can always fall back safely on what you see, but as you learn to see better—- to see more and to see more deeply—-you might find out that seeing is, after all, not enough.

One day, then, you find yourself using everything you see and everything you know, to start painting what you don’t know, won’t ever know. 

If you manage to get that all going together, well, you just might have a chance of painting the mountain--or anything, really—- and getting it almost right.  

- Kevin Macneil Brown, excerpt from a novel in progress, 2019.

Mountains in Winter

                                        Alpenglow on Worcester Range 
                         Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper, 2018.

                                         

  

Sunburst Over Continental Divide

Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor and gouache on paper, 2018.

Snow came in  November here in Vermont, and I prepared my winter palette earlier than usual. Having just finished the first draft of a new novel set in mountainous country, I found that mountains were very much in my heart and mind, and mountains are mostly what I have been painting in these last months of the year. 

two quiet autumn places in sound

During the month of October I  made two pieces of sound art inspired by a desire to create an audio analogue to the inner and outer energies of two quiet places in the autumn landscape.

The tools I used were simple: a steel guitar tuned to proportions that came from meditation and listening, a decades-old reverb unit with delay and echo settings I had made a long time ago, and a laptop for capture and mix.

The music was played and recorded in one pass, which resulted in the first piece below. The same material was shaped in mixing to create the second piece.As I worked I immersed myself in memories and  feelings from the places that were the inspirations.

October Colors and Textures (New Paintings)

Mountain Pond, October Morning

(watercolor and graphite)

October River ( watercolor and gouache)

                                                  October, View North ( watercolor and gouache)


                                            Paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown, October 2018.

Rust Mountain Poems

My dreams find

        home

in distant mountains.

What can we bring

that would be a blessing

to this clean new edge of sky?

Awake and wash

at pond’s edge; ice

has not yet formed.

See and feel the

feathery clouds in

morning’s wind-washed sky;

listen as October leaf

falls and finds the damp, soft

earth.

Whoever built this gate

has gone away;

hear the latch snick shut as

rust meets wood meets emptiness.

Deer running sleek

in sacred places:

open meadow meets birch thicket;

not far now to go, to find

cool shade of hemlocks and sleep.

   

Not quite

     reaching

crescent moon

white pine is

 dark and tall

and swaying

  strong

   but

   also

holding hard to

      earth.

Easy to see the wind

stir quiet water, make

ripples outward—

but it might take this lifetime

to know and become

ripples deep and inward.

                                                   - Kevin Macneil Brown

                                                         

                                                                  

Hinman Lake, July Morning

                                                      Hinman Lake, July Morning-
                                Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, gouache on paper, 2018.


This summer I've been focusing on painting in gouache. As my favored medium is watercolor, it has been challenging and satisfying to explore different ways of thinking about color, light, and texture; layering opaque, rather than transparent, colors..

 Working from sketchbooks and memory, I decided to make a gouache painting of a place that  continues to resonate inside  me: Hinman Lake in the Routt National Forest in Clark, Colorado.

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

Three thoughts in early spring (painting)

Three thoughts in early spring- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,

graphite, watercolor, and ballpoint pen on paper, 3/24/2018

Places of power and repose (new music)

There are places I can go to—woods, rivers, shorelines, high mountains—where the deep presence of something true arrives inside me. It often comes from the impossible approach of sounds that are almost a silence, a mystery.  For days, weeks, months afterward I carry these sounds inside. When the need is strong, I go to my studio and find ways to bring these sounds back, to share what I can of the gifts received in these places of power and repose.

Wheeler's Point (watercolor painting)

                                       Wheeler's Point- painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
                                       watercolor and gouache on paper, 2018.

Painting the other day, and a memory surfaced as it took shape on the paper. It was fifteen or so years ago, a day spent with my mother, Patricia Macneil, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, her home town. We spent a drizzly spring day exploring, revisiting places and stories strong in her memory. For some reason I really wanted to find the place called Wheeler’s Point, and we ended up alongside the tidal, liminal wash of the Annisquam River. 

All this returned  about halfway through the process of  making this watercolor, and I had the sensation, as I moved the paint, of an old  Polaroid  paradoxically dissolving and developing at the same time. Two days later now, and I am grateful for the rising of this memory to the surface. -KMB

Trail Run

 And then there are days when you are given a chance to take a trail, one you have never been on before. You say yes to the moment, fill up your water bottle, and head out, not sure what you will find. After a half hour of climbing, you come to an opening, and there it is: a place you have been waiting all your life to find. Almost breathless at this altitude, you keep running. You know you will get home later, but for now you just want to keep going and going, Distant snowy mountains shimmer in the July sunlight. A Coopers Hawk circles in the pure cerulean sky. Outward now is inward, and inward is the new unknown...

           -KMB

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

                                                          Hinman Lake, Number 5
                   Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor and graphite on paper, 2018

Secret Waters, Wilderness Shadows (New Music)

With freezing rain and sleet pinging wind-blown against the windows before dawn, it seemed the perfect January morning to stay inside. Coffee and meditation led to a second cup-- and a surge of deep cleaning and re-organization of my studio space.
Before long the resultant opening of inner and outer spaciousness led to an idea. I found the audio file of a steel guitar improv that had been the heart of a previous composition, and began to re-work it with retrograde, delay, panning; EQ, layers of chorus and echo.  After a while I heard another opening, and added three layers of pulse and shimmer on staggered mandolin tracks, then panned them like voices of birds, like shadows of tree-branches.
Three mixes in, and there it was: a place in sound that I belonged to for the moment.-KMB

Blue Song, Far Shimmer (New Book)

I am excited to announce the publication of the sixth Liam Dutra mystery novel, BLUE SONG, FAR SHIMMER.  This one sends Liam on the lost trail of a Vermont woman who vanished back in 1925. As Liam traces her past through a far mountain landscape he finds himself confronting his own darkest fears and visions. 

Here's the first chapter if you'd like to check it out:

Chapter One

   Golden light suffused the chapel of Saint Augustine’s church.  The sound of the choir had the hushed feel of gentle snowfall, a soft blur as they sang--together, for the most part.  Or maybe it was that pale light somehow blending with the music, making harmonies sound better, more perfect than they actually were. 

 Our daughter, Rose, was a sleeping bundle, warm in my arms. Of course she was asleep: What better way to quiet an over-excited five-year old than a Mass delivered in murmurs on Christmas Eve by an elderly priest who seems to be barely awake himself?

Shawn’s mother, Faye Donahue, had warned us that Father Thomas, a guest of the parish this night, might be lulling, to use her word for it. But she was thrilled to have her daughter and granddaughter with her in church tonight. It was a promise we’d made to her, and making good on it felt right.

I myself was doing my very best to stay awake. The mellow light and stained glass, the kind voices, the smells of soap and perfume and wool clothes tinged with winter wood smoke were pulling me into dreamland.

But a sudden cold draft from the cathedral’s open doors at the end of the service stirred me awake. I stood, handed over to Shawn the slack bundle that was our daughter, and slipped into my old gray sweater.

Outside in the dark, people thronged in chattering groups to their parked cars along Barre Street. A century ago this street and been home to work-sheds for the granite industry and rows of apartment houses for the laborers--many of them Italian, Scots, Irish, Swedes---here in the hill-nestled city of Montpelier, Vermont.

 This church, tall and imposing with its gray stone and big rose windows, had been the heart of the neighborhood back then. In a smaller way, it perhaps still was, though the industry was almost-- though not quite--gone, and the people who lived here now were more apt to work for the State of Vermont, or the big insurance company up on the hill, or the retail stores and restaurants downtown and on the outskirts.

 From the shadows beyond a streetlamp, a tall, broad-shouldered man called out Faye’s name. She moved toward him, showing that same taut confidence of stride and bearing, that same quizzical tilt of head that I so often saw in her daughter.

 Shawn kept moving, as I would have, too, so as not to stir up the sleeping kid. I hung back, waiting for Faye.

Faye called me over to where she stood with the big man in the shadows.

 “Somebody who’d like to meet you,” she said, “And I think you’ll be very interested in what he has to say.”

 “Ethan LaSalette,” the man offered a handshake. I felt the hard calluses, saw now that he was about Faye’s age.  Even in the hazy light of the streetlights I could see that he had dark eyes and dark hair, a full and friendly-looking face.

“I’ve known your mother-in-law since we were kids,” he said. “Look, it’s cold out here. And I don’t want to keep you from your family. But I wanted to connect with you. I think we can help each other out.”

 His breath made a luminous vapor in the lamplight. The sounds of voices came from the front of the nearby church, along with a variety of footfalls--winter boots, high heels, dress shoes--on the stone steps.

“I saw your local history column in the paper, the City Bridge,” he went on. “I read what you wrote about looking for traces of a woman named Marie Dubois; about trying to find a granite statue she had posed for back in the 1920s.”

I had just begun the weekly column the month before. It was hard to believe that the one-sentence query at the end of what had been only my second column had already stirred up interest.

 “Like I wrote,” I said, nodding, feeling my heartbeat kick up a notch. “She’s only a name in somebody’s diary, a few sentences. But I’d love to know who she was, what might have happened to her.”

Ethan nodded back at me. 

     I could see that Faye was grinning, even as she hugged herself against the cold.

  “A woman named Marie Dubois was my mother’s cousin,” Ethan said. “Marie disappeared when she--Marie, I mean--was a young woman. And my mother was haunted for decades by… not knowing what ever became of her. And I’d like to know more about her, too. I can tell you some things. Maybe you know some things that I don’t. Let’s get together soon. But someplace warm, that’s not the church steps on Christmas Eve.”

 “Yes,” I said, thinking, if this is the same Marie Dubois, then here it is, the first gift of this Christmas.

(excerpt from BLUE SONG, FAR SHIMMER, by Kevin Macneil Brown, Liminal Editions, 2017)

 The book is available in print and kindle editions at amazon.com:

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Shimmer-Kevin-Macneil-Brown/dp/197573467X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1512913230&sr=8-1&keywords=kevin+macneil+brown 

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Shimmer-Kevin-Macneil-Brown-ebook/dp/B077RLJ833/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1512913349&sr=8-2&keywords=kevin+macneil+brown 

                                 

First Snow at First Light

Second cup of coffee kicked on a  snowy Sunday morning, and next thing you know I had set up telecaster and a 20th-century digital delay, improvised and tracked this sonic meditation in one take. Added a little bit of ambient mandolin, then mixed down quickly, to keep the mood. I'm thinking this might be a regular thing in the coming winter. I like the impetus to work quickly and commit to the moment.

Watercolor Layers

I thought it might be fun to share the layers of a recent watercolor painting. The painting was made at home after my summer trip to Colorado. I had in mind the sunset that greeted me just an hour or so after getting off the plane.

First thoughts and memories.

                                     
                                             Sky and mountains.


                                           

                                           Sunset, Sand Mountan, Routt County,Colorado

                                         Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor and graphite on paper, 2017.