I've just returned from a trip to Yellowstone, where I taught a plein air watercolor class for the Yellowstone Institute. We visited numerous sites; the fall color this year was wonderful, probably the best I have ever seen there. Swan Lake displayed golden grasses and sedges along its shores, Sheepeater Cliffs aspens and willows, and fireweed was turning scarlet and maroon in several locations, too. Students enjoyed trying all these locales. I recently read an excerpt in the New York Review of Books from Wislawa Szymborska's Nobel prize acceptance speech and I thought of it as I saw the unique interpretations of landscape created by each student. Szymborska addressed Ecclesiastes, who wrote, "There's nothing new under the sun." She said: "But you yourself were born new under the sun. And the poem you created is also new under the sun, since no one wrote it down before you. And all your readers are also new under the sun, since those who lived before you couldn't read your poem. And that cypress that you're sitting under hasn't been growing since the dawn of time. It came into being by way of another cypress similar to yours, but not exactly the same."
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