‘Like a hummable melody’

“Sky on Fire,’’ by Sue Charles, at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.

Ms. Charles is based in Amesbury, Mass., on the Merrimack River. Her artist bio says:

“The northeast coast of the Atlantic is my subject…. Paintings exist in many dimensions;They depict three dimensions of light and space with two dimensions of color, they express the fourth dimension of time in their marks and they reveal metaphysical dimensions of thought and emotion. Finding the intersection between these ways of perceiving is my goal. I work to express the long lines of landscape space, light and air connecting everything and the quiet profundity of nature. A good painting contains only the essentials and it stays with you like a hummable melody. I aim for that. www.suecharlesstudio.com.’’

View northeast from Powwow Hill, in Amesbury

Night falls on Andover

At Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.: Above, “Ignite the Night” (mixed media on canvas), by Debra Corbett, below, “Sundowner” (oil painting), by Sue Charles

Greetings from North Korea

"Column of Light,'' by Sue Charles, at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.

Gotta go way up into the North Country to see this scene this year

"Iced'' (oil on aluminum panel), by Sue Charles, at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.

An open winter?

"Beaver Pond'' (oil on panel), by Sue Charles, at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.

That is, a beaver pond in an "open winter,'' with little snow. It has been open in most of southern New England so far this winter. Will we get clobbered soon? Or maybe we'll get most of our snow in March, as happened in 1956, after a very open winter until then? In any case,  innumerable surprises lie ahead.

Meanwhile, "live every day as if it's your last, and someday you'll be right'' -- a line from the great  movie Breaker Morant, set in the Second Boer War.