So off we went to my beloved mountains, small boy and my husband and I. Late March is a wonderful time in the Alberta Rockies: decidedly still winter, sparklingly sunny and warm enough to form cumulous clouds towering over brilliantly etched peaks. Even small boy agreed to wear his sunglasses.

Clouds over Mount Rundle. © FMVettergreen

This was a family trip but, well, I always have my artist's hat on. I was hoping to fill my eyes with mountain gorgeousness — yes! — and come back to the studio with a collection of mental snapshots, but though I had a grand time messing around with iPhoneography (did you know that's a whole artistic discipline?) there aren't any paintings waiting their turn. Instead there are two smallish studies on my easels, both of them snippets from my commute, just everyday things that caught my eye in the spring thaw, abstracted into colours and shapes and textures on random canvases from the stack under the workbench.

I've been thinking about why there's a painting in the bedraggled hedge in the middle of an inner-city concrete traffic calming structure when there isn't one in all that amazing landscape.

Two words keep coming up: seasonal and habitat. The hares that roam my neighborhood have their early summer-brown feet. The lawn across the street catches the sun and is already free of snow.

I have to paint where I live.