Landscape Interlude, Pigment, and Hard Rock

This is an 11x14 landscape from Stratton Road I did a couple weeks ago, followed by a more recent 8x10 pastel looking up Luce Road.

Macfarlane writes that "Geology...is intimate with the history of painting; in oil paintings of landscapes, the earth has been pressed into service to express itself."  He is referring to pigments.

Here's another, possibly more profound thought: "Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage.  And it is a physical as well as a cerebral horror, for to acknowledge that the hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body.

Yet there is also something curiously exhilarating about the contemplation of deep time.  True, you learn yourself to be a blip in the larger projects of the universe.  But you are also rewarded with the realization that you do exist--as unlikely as it may seem, you do exist."