This is a plein air picture, painted on a trip to Connemara on the West Coast of Ireland. The colors in the Irish landscape have to be seen to be believed. I always thought pictures of Ireland were color-enhanced. When I arrived, this misconception was quickly dispelled. I remember driving along the road between Claddaghduff and Clifden, and looking off to my right and seeing this scene. The intensity of the greens was striking. I pulled off the road, set up my easel, and painted it.

This too is a plein air picture. On my 1996 trip, my friend Vince (who owns the Chapel Hill house pictured above) and I rented a cottage on the westernmost tip of Connemara. The Atlantic Ocean was about 70 yards from our back door. The area was remote, even by Irish standards, and there were many free ranging cows. This picture was painted outside our front door, looking south toward Omey Island, which rises dimly in the background.

My wife's parents owned a cabin in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, between Franklin and Highlands. She went there every year throughout her childhood, I went regularly too once I made the acquaintance of her family and we married, and our children went also-and still do, when we can rent the cabin from its new owners. The cabin is reached by a dirt road off Highway 64, which proceeds through a tunnel of trees. In this plein air sketch, one is nearing the cabin, which beckons as a bright patch of sunlight through to dark tree limbs ahead.

Because Skywater Road is rather primitive and no doubt in accessible by car in the winter, the residents mailboxes are all down near the highway. No doubt their number has increased in a ramshackle way over the years, as is evident. This is a watercolor, a medium I use occasionally as the logistical requirements are simpler than those for oils. This is a plein air sketch.

Painting at the beach is a challenge: there's nothing there except sky, sand and sea. On one trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, I became intrigued by the physics of waves, and painted many watercolors such as this, trying to capture their curl just before they break and that semi-transparent color they take on when they rise high enough for the light to pass through them. It isn't easy!

An extraordinary landscape is that found on the north side of the peninsula of Cape Cod at Provincetown. The so-called Dunes is an area of almost lunar aspect, as it is totally devoid of any sign of human life-except, of course, for the 20 or so dune shacks that dot the rolling sand hills. My friend Peter-who is also a painter-has the use of one. (I say "use" because property ownership in this part of the world is too complicated for even a lawyer like myself to understand.) The Dunes are a perfect place to paint, because one is totally undistracted by anything: the only noise is the wind. This painting shows The Grail, the shack I stayed in, and another off in the distance, and the vast reaches of sand and sea off to the west. This is a plein air painting.

This too is a plein air painting, done in the Provincetown Dunes. The town of Provincetown is off to the south, although the only evidence of it at this distance is the Pilgrim Monument, which rises above the horizon.

My boyhood was spent in the Finger Lakes of New York, as my father was for a time a professor at Cornell University. To me the landscapes around these lakes-- Canandaigua, Keuka, Seneca, Cayuga, Skeneateles-are wonderful because the Lakes are forever present. On this rural road, one sees the glint of Lake Seneca in the distance.

This small picture was painted outdoors, in an hour or so before Peter and I had to head back to Boston. It is less fully developed than must of my pictures, but it does convey something of the mood of the Dunes. It is my daughter's Jojo's favorite.

As a part of my painting discipline, and to get away and have a change of scene, I take trips-the sole purpose of which is to paint. I have always liked John Constable, the English landscape painter, so in 2002 I spent 10 days at Flatford Mill-where Constable himself was born and spent his boyhood--in Suffolk, England. Across the Stour River is the small town of Dedham, and the valley in between was the subject of many Constable landscapes. The Vale is part of the National Trust and is protected now. Even so, it was striking that absolutely nothing had changed since the days when Constable painted there 200 years ago: the pollarded elms, the cows, the spire of Dedham's St. Mary's Church, the ducks-it was as if one had stepped into a painting. Every morning when I woke up, a semicircle of about 20 ducks would be waiting for their morning snack-which I of course duly provided!

This is a plein air sketch, looking from a hill near Flatford south toward Dedham, with its hallmark spire. The Stour River is the line of demarcation between the shires of Essex and Suffolk in England's region of East Anglia. The region was the home to the religious nonconfromists who settled in Massachusetts Bay, and so the names of the towns here are quite familiar to New Englanders: Dedham, of course, but also Boston, Cambridge, Sudbury, Billericay, Ipswich, Braintree, Bedford, Wenham, Boxford, Middleton, Toppesfield-and many more. Makes one feel quite at home.

I live in Cambridge, close to the BU Bridge, so the Charles River is a big part of my daily life. I find the sight of it nourishing: it always seems to put my little problems in their proper perspective. And while the river and the lands bordering it are beautiful on days that most of us customarily think of as "good," the days of rain and snow also have their particular beauty. I wanted to capture those unseasonable moments. Obviously rainy day or winter painting would be difficult to do plein air. I resort to photographs for these-that way even the geese sit still!

In this picture I focused on the wetness of the roadway, and the rather complicated geometry of the overpass over the BU Bridge rotary.

This picture shows the rotary from below the overpass. I was intrigued by the contrast between the flat colors of the scene and the garishness of the pick up truck waiting for the change of the lights-which provide the only other color to this somber scene.

The view of Boston from Cambridge on a summer day is one of the most spectacular I have seen. The winter scene, bleached by light and ice, has its own grandeur. The severity of the Longfellow Bridge, with its monumental pylons and damp rusting iron, evokes exotic places like Russia's St. Petersburg.