Central Valley

Here's a post to keep the lights on here while we're blogging about Nicaragua over here.
This picture was painted on the day I was born in 1976 by Rollin Pickford, a Fresno artist who died earlier this year and who is sometimes referred to as the "painter laureate of the San Joaquin Valley."  My mom found and scanned this painting and sent it to me as a very cool birthday gift.  If you drive around the central valley you'll see dozens of old farms like this one, very often draped in that late-summer yellow -- for me it's a neat vision of home.  And Pickford's luminous water color paintings are definitely worth checking out.