ELSIE KELLOGG MORSE GALLERY

Popham Sandpipers

Hog Island Cove

Early Spring

As a young bride of an ecologist, I desperately wanted to take part in Doug’s field studies, but soon discovered that all too often the best help I could offer would be allowing long stretches of silence. Irrepressible restlessness turned out to be the best cure for all previous inhibitions, and I quickly discovered that landscape painting is mostly about the pleasure of the artist on the spot. In the course of perhaps two hours I would try to frame, select, sketch, and color a canvas in hopes that a picture would take shape. Sometimes I was pleased and sometimes not, but always I would see the landscape more deeply; I’d notice countless details of beauty or interest I would never have caught without the observation required for painting. Best of all, I could remember a painting site so vividly I could close my eyes and bring myself to it anytime. How often can this be true of even our most favorite picnic places?

Epupa Falls Namibia

Himba People Namibia

After children joined the family, time to paint was more limited, but the camera stepped in as a workable substitute. Framing pictures doesn’t require as careful observation as drawing and painting, but it still helps lock particular landscapes in memory. Now that the children are grown we both find photography enhances the pleasure of traveling as well as the ability to share with friends at home.



The fun of PhotoShop cannot be denied, and once in a while, it’s good to just play. Here’s one that may be a little over the top for metaphor, but I couldn’t resist layering my parents’ proper Episcopal wedding photo into a California sunset! If advertisers can do it, why cant we?



The fanciful boy in the ferns speaks to a persisting enchantment with the fairy people of storybooks.

"9 Moments in the Emergence of a Monarch" records one lucky lunchtime when a chrysalis that we had hanging in a flower arrangement began to open right in front of our eyes.