The Skies series paintings are all one foot by one foot acrylics on canvas, from my memory and imagination. They were inspired by my weekly drive across the San Joaquin Valley from the Sierra Nevada foothills town of Mariposa to the coast in Pacifica, California. I was struck by how vast an area can be depicted in so little space, with the bottom inch of the painting conveying miles, or even tens of mile of distance and landscape. Storms, sunsets, and clouds scudding inland from over the ocean, the moon above, the flat valley or the sea below, sometimes show traces of human activity dwarfed by the powerand scale of nature: the sublime in contemporary California.