Walking is the simplest of things. One foot in front of the other, repeat. I’m not talking about hiking. I’ve done that and it has its challenges and rewards. Here I’m talking about walking, maybe all day, or at least for a chunk of the day. Maybe for days on end. When you just walk you see things differently.

The summer of 2020 was graced with the unexpected beauty of Comet NEOWISE. NEOWISE is an acronym for NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission, a space probe built to detect asteroids along with the occasional comet. NEOWISE discovered the comet on March 27, 2020. At first it was much like several other faint 2020 comets such as Atlas or c/2017 T2 PanSTARRS, but that began to change in June and came to full fruition in July. Because comets are named for their discoverers, this comet was named for a space probe mission, NEOWISE.

At the 2016 Colby College RESCUE sale—an annual yard-sale event of stuff students left behind at the end of the school year—I came across a Ziploc bag full of tubes of acrylic artist’s paint. I asked a volunteer, “How much?” Five dollars. Sold. The bag held about 20 tubes of barely used acrylics. My wife asked why I bought them—after all, she reminded me, you don’t paint. I replied, “I do now.” However, before I got a chance to try out the paints, we left for a two-week trip to Sicily for a wedding. When we returned, images of Sicily filled my head. I pulled out the paints and subsequently created four variations of one of my favorite scenes.

Welos Arts and Sciences is a new venue for sharing my art. I have thought about creating such a website for a long time, but it had always felt like just another way to eat up time on the web. I already spend too much time in cyberspace whether it’s FaceBook, Northern Stars Planetarium, my Fine Art America photography site, Dark Sky Maine, or Sandbox Atlas and Postcards from Gus. I have my hands involved in many spheres these days. Do I really need another? Yes.