So running water did its usual trick on me last night before bed and I think I have a handle on what I’m doing for the January Take it Further Challenge.

There’s this place on the road to Santa Fe from Los Alamos, where you’re coming up a hill looking toward the Sangre de Cristos. The mountains are perfectly framed inbetween the hills on either side of the road, and you can’t see where the road goes beyond the top of the hill. I always feel, “I could go anywhere from here.”

Before we went to bed last night we caught the end of a PBS show, P.O.V., about Rafe Esquith, the teacher of “The Hobart Shakespeareans.” He’s amazing and inspiring and changing lives one kid at a time in an inner-city Los Angeles school.

He’s definitely someone worth admiration. But I don’t want to make a portrait of one particular person, because I am not called to tell someone else’s story. So rather than devoting a piece to this one extraordinary teacher, or any number of extraordinary individuals in my life, I decided to look at that place on the road, that place where I feel anything, anywhere is possible, and fill it in with evocations of all the people who make new beginnings possible. Some of the words scribbled into the landscape are teachers, artists, scholars, musicians, mothers, grandfathers, and so on.

I still can’t quite see where to take the image — to a more realized paper version, or fabric collage with embroidery and painting. I do find that the color scheme for the challenge fits just right with the landscape, which surprised me. So, I’m in a fundamentally different place with this than I was yesterday.

January’s Take it Further Challenge, a year-long event hosted by the incredible Sharon B, is to create a work based either on the feeling of admiration for another person, or this color palette:

To be quite honest, I have no idea how to translate the first into images. The color palette is not in my usual parameters, either. So, I feel very much at square one on this one. The Flickr pool is already quite active, though!

There are many people who I admire, and for many different reasons, but I don’t like the idea of doing a portrait. Perhaps a collage of words in stitchings may be the direction I head in.

More as I get some time to doodle.