Da Vinci and many of the old masters would say that if you want to do something “new,” turn to nature. Nature has elements in it that you can see afresh—I believe in the adage that you can’t make things up better than they already exist in space. Kant would discuss how his notion of beauty was able to emulate nature. Near Andrew’s grandfather’s wondrous old CA cabin from the ’50s in the middle of nowhere, in Meadowbrook, near Lake Elsinore, off the 15 and past cul-de-sac suburbia is Tenaja, in Murrieta. It looks like Bonanza up there, with rolling meadows and natural parks of oak trees, far from the burbs and strip malls, and more like what California must have been when people first settled in the area.

We dreamt of buying land there to one day build a home, and extensively became obsessed with this, although not knowing how we would really afford it. These tree paintings are from my own photos of a plot of land in the middle of this nowhere, one we deemed Two Oaks (Castles in the Sky). It is on a terrace of land that you must go up a steep, turning road, part of the property—there is no gas or electric—you would have to bring it up there—and the road is just a dirt road—which we would also have to pave to make practicable. After we were to do all this, in addition to buying the land itself, we would have to build a house.

We wanted for years to afford to do this, back in ’08, it still was a dream, but I thought it would be great to literally paint our dream, and live there in my imagination, embracing the nature and all it had to offer about California and that part of nature, but also project upon it our deep romantic feelings for the place, the area (where Andrew’s family all live nearby), the land, for each other, and our future together.

The neat thing, that as of this updated writing in 2022 when finishing this book, I’m writing from our new two-acre lawn, near our first cabin mentioned here, where after six years of looking since we moved back to California when I accepted my USC teaching position we finally purchased our dream home.

Sometimes when you paint dreams, they become true, and painting so many images of where we wanted to live perhaps helped to set this course to this moment! Although we didn’t purchase the property “Two Oaks” (although we came close to buying the log cabin plot next door a couple of years ago!), we got a modest ’70s ranch-style home, in the same neighborhood as our first cabin. The crystal meth labs and ZZ Top guys all moved away—and now this is a decent neighborhood, albeit one of the last of the still-rural areas in Southern California. I have baby chickens in a cage in front of me, an Anatolian puppy named Hero (and our older German Shepherd, Leonardo), our African Grey parrot Picasso, and over a dozen new baby pheasants (with our cats hopefully staying far away!). We hope this will be our heaven on earth forever, a long time to wait but very grateful after initially painting these images almost fifteen years ago!