Habe die Ehre!

(pronounced Habedairy, more or less) is a traditional Bavarian greeting or farewell, that literally means "have the honor".  I love the way the phrase rolls off the tongues of the native Bavarians that I've met over here, and I also love the meaning.  It is said with a jovial respect--sort of happy and yet meaningful at the same time, and it seems to me like a badge of mountain-dweller honor to be greeted in such a way.
So thats why I decided to name the cow in this painting "Habedairy".  I made friends with it when I went for a hike with a few of my teammates up to an Alm where we got drinks and ate cheese made at the Alm, presumable from the milk of this cow and her compatriots.  I swatted the flies away from her and rubbed the top of her nose, and then she decided that I was her friend and drooled all over my leg while I took a picture of her.  LOTS of drool.
I just wish that I could have somehow captured in my painting the music of the ringing cowbells echoing across the hillside.  But alas, paint is inadequate for capturing some things.

I'm in Bavaria right now at a training camp with the rest of the U.S. Biathlon team.  We train at the Ruhpolding biathlon stadium, which hosts a world cup every year that thousands of fans attend, and the stadium is a tourist attraction all summer long--every day huge tours come through to watch the biathletes train.  Its pretty weird, especially since most people in the U.S. don't know what biathlon is!
We also get to go running, hiking, biking and rollerskiing on the little roads and trails throughout the area, and I am in awe with the flowerboxes on all the houses, and the sheer number of picturesque farms.  There will likely be more Bavarian paintings to come!

Yikes! I need to catch up!

I've been bad--I stopped posting to my blog for about 6 months.  That is way too long!  And I've painted quite a bit in that time, so it's inexcusable.  I didn't paint much from my Antholz post through the end of the winter.  But then in May I spent a week at the Johnson Studio Center, doing a painting residency as part of their Vermont Artists Week.   It was a great change of focus from my life of biathlon racing and training, and it was a great experience.  I met lots of interesting VT artists and admired lots of work that was very different from mine.  And I painted a lot.  But by the end of the week, I was actually almost tired of painting.  My paintings seemed boring to me compared to everyone else's work, and though I'd done a lot of painting, I sort of felt like I should have accomplished even more.  I had a rushed transition back into training life, and I never even got pictures of all of my paintings, let alone posted them here.  I still don't have pictures of the oil paintings I did there, which took up most of my time.

And then spring turned into summer...and I have been slow at getting back into painting.  But I've done a little, and gotten really into a few projects for friends that I can't spoil by posting here now.  So despite the fact that this is an incomplete catching-up, here it is!  Just a few of the paintings from my spring and summer.

A pleine aire painting I did in Johnson.

A couple of kids, standing in front of their bamboo-jungle at the Koons' farm.  

More goofy kids playing on their seesaw.