RE: summer dormancy, literary reference

Sean:
About two years ago, the Crocker Art Museum, here in Sacramento had a collection of California Impressionist painters's works on display.  It was magnificent.  Talk about the lupines and poppies on Coast RT. 1 and your request put me in mind of it.  Instead of the soft muted pastels of the French Impressionists, the paintings were in the vibrant colors of the blue and purple California hillsides - gaudy and unrealistic to citizens of other parts of the world perhaps, but completely and utterly home to us native Californians.  Perhaps you can find some documentation of these gifted turn-of the-century painters that would feed into your work.  I now include one of my favorite poems, written by William Everson, a former UCSC celebrated poet and professor(?).  It does not describe the coastal mediterranean California, but a mediterranean portion of the state just slightly inland - Lodi to be exact!  I grew up just a stone's throw from where he wrote this.   Cheers, Karrie Reid
San Joaquin
 
This valley after the storms can be beautiful beyond the telling,
Though our cityfolk scorn it, cursing heat in the summer and drabness in winter,
And flee it: Yosemite and the sea.
They seek splendor; who would touch them must stun them;
The nerve that is dying needs thunder to rouse it.
 
I in the vineyard, in green-time and dead-time, come to it dearly,
And take nature neither freaked nor amazing,
But the secret shining, the soft, indeterminate wonder.
I watch it morning and noon, the unutterable sundowns,
And love as the leaf does the bough.
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