I enter Wisconsin from the Illinois border at Beloit. My plan for painting Wisconsin is based on some faulty weather info that says the weather will be better to the north. Just about the time I cross the border the rain moves in. Having lived in Wisconsin, I feel I have lots of reference photos in my files at home so I pick up the interstate in a downpour and head west to La Crosse. I travelled through much of Wisconsin when I lived near Madison and there are beautiful and varied spots from Door County in the northeast to the dells and bluffs in the west. We used to go skiing near those bluffs at La Crosse mountain. It is very pretty country and the sun finally comes out in the late afternoon. I see a neat farm with a corn maze, goats and cows so I stop and ask permission. I get all set up and discover my brushes are missing, so I pack up again and go into town. I find a Michaels and buy a couple of okay brushes but by now it is cold and the
light is gone, so I get a hotel for the night. Upset that I have lost about $300 worth of brushes somewhere in the last 3 states, I get in a very foul mood. I try to get a healthy turkey dinner at the restaurant next to the hotel but it is worse than a Swanson TV dinner. I start to feel like the whole trip is a mess: the weather, a cold, no brushes. Why am I doing this? My studio seems very inviting. My painting of Wisconsin will have to wait for a better mood at the end of the next day. When I loop back through Wisconsin from Iowa at Prairie du Chien, I find an old hotel on the Mississippi, the refurbishing project of an older gentleman who envisions tourists arriving in trains fron Madison. Apparently he has been working on the project for many years and the local man who tells me about it doubts it will ever actually be finished. But I am moved by the vision of someone who sees the beauty in the same building I do and dares to have a dream for it. It reminds me of why I am doing this trip and how my little problems end up leading me to places where I may not have come to paint otherwise. Sometimes you have to push through issues of weather and inconvenience rather than expect inspiration at every turn. Wisconsin history is full of people fighting against harsh conditions to carve out the beautiful farms that became "America's Dairyland"
