Cover of the book Winter Reyes: Poems and Paintings by Robin L. Chandler
The vernal equinox arrived and brought a blast of summer in typically springtime March. But I’m holding on to the memories of rain and wind, cold nights, frosty mornings, and blue winter light. And luckily, I can easily reconnect by opening a book that captures the feeling of winter in painting and poetry.
Inspired by my midwinter hikes, Winter Reyes rejoices in the hibernal beauty of Point Reyes National Seashore and shares the hope I find in nature’s resilience. My paintings and poems commemorate this jewel of the National Park Service. Copies of the book can be purchased on my website. I hope you have as much pleasure reading as I had in the making.
“reaching the bridge, the water parts, brush arches to the block page
Wet on wet, the work begins, the atmosphere emerges
Sketch of the Coso Volcanic Field and Red Hill near Fossil Falls, Owens Valley. Robin L. Chandler, 2026.
The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sunbeam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them all, — that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms, — the totality of nature; which the Italians expressed by defining beauty “il piu nell’ uno.” Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce. Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man. Thus in art, does nature work through the will of man filled with the beauty of her first works.
Excerpt from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Nature published in Ralph Waldo Emerson Collection: Collected Essays and Lectures (p.9)published in 1849.
Sketch of holiday cheer in Point Reyes Station. Robin L. Chandler, 2025.
“In 1935, the National Park Service recommended an 83-square mile park, but there was no action until 1958. By this time, subdivisions were again being planned, logging was underway at Inverness Ridge, and the state was planning a freeway that would replace Highway 1 and open the area to suburban development. One lobbyist told a Congressional committee that by the year 2000
‘there will no longer be a Marin County. There will be a greater San Francisco..…the section we have under discussion today, gentlemen, will be as intensely built over as Palo Alto, or Burlingame or San Mateo.’
The MCL [Marin Conservation League] worked with Marin’s representative in Congress Clem Miller, who introduced and tirelessly promoted his Point Reyes National Seashore bill in the House, while California’s US Senator Clair Engle, pushed it through in the Senate…..In a compromise with ranchers, the park bill allowed cattle and dairy ranching to continue for 25 years in a 27-square mile “pastoral zone,” while livestock grazing elsewhere would be phased out. Congress passed the bill, and President Kennedy signed it on September 13, 1962. The park was authorized to include 83 square miles, just as the Park Service had originally recommended…..”
“Dürer was the first to take nature – a grassy meadow, for example, something completely mundane – and portray it. That kind of depiction hadn’t been done before. Until then, plants were always symbolic, like the lilies in a picture of the Virgin Mary. Earlier, each plant had a specific meaning. Dürer portrayed the meadow simply as a meadow – and that was completely revolutionary…..art doesn’t reside in nature as pure reality that you can depict directly. That doesn’t work anymore. Nature is no longer the innocent nature if once was…..
to make secretive is also to create a clearing in which something becomes visible, in which room for a new perception is created, but not in the scientific sense, in the mythological……
art brings all of the disparate kinds of knowledge into a new system. It brings this knowledge together and creates a unified view that must be constantly reinterpreted. It cannot be defined for all time…..
as a painter, one always hopes that under the surface, underneath what is visible, whether bricks or whatever, there’s something that will later mean more than what people see today. That is the veil…..that the painting already knows what will be in two centuries, what those looking at the painting will see in it in two hundred years. The veil of Isis can be a brick or a forest or whatever is painted and what is hidden beneath it is fed by the proceeding centuries but will also work in the centuries to come.”
Excerpt from Anselm Kiefer: In Conversation with Klaus Dermutz (New Delhi, India: Seagull Books, 2019) pps. 230 – 234
Twilight in a meadow in Bishop. Robin L. Chandler, 2025
“Mass extinctions are extremely rare and catastrophic events, but the human-driven one is seldom deemed newsworthy by the dominant media. This is not an incidental oversight: the destruction of life’s diversity must remain invisible or obscure in the public domain, because it is fully entangled with the freedoms that people (are goaded to) value and seek.”
Glenbrook Trail, Point Reyes National Seashore. Robin L. Chandler, 2025.
“So while this is a book about the music of memory, it also necessarily becomes a book about the memory of music and the deeper social memory of art – its ability to recall the catastrophes of war but also the optimistic promise and gleam of earlier eras, or what the critic Walter Benjamin called, with touching simplicity, “hope in the past.” This book in fact draws inspiration from Benjamin’s vision of the true purpose of history: to sort through the rubble of earlier eras in order to recover these buried shards of unrealized hope, to reclaim them, to redeem them. They are, as he saw it, nothing more or less than the moral and spiritual building blocks of an alternate future.”
Long-billed Curlews at Limantour Beach, Point Reyes National Seashore in Winter. Robin L. Chandler, 2025
“Thomas Berry was a US cultural historian who introduced the broader legal concept of Earth jurisprudence early in the twenty-first century. Earth jurisprudence is the philosophy of law and human governance that says humans are just one element in a wider community of beings, and that the welfare of one speaks to the welfare of all. “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects, “ Berry argued, and it’s through the work of people such as Stone, Berry, Kimmerer, Kolbert, and others that we are moving our collective understanding, and our will, toward a more environmentally just world. In the face of the ecological catastrophes beating down on us, we must remember the collective good of countless people as well as the rights of trees, and of the land that supports and nurtures us all.”
alive in the sea of information 