Places I've been (sort of)

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Now, it may seem odd that an amateur photographer would be showing some of the places he's been, not with photographs, but with paintings. But in reality, the experience of being somewhere often cannot be captured adequately with photography, and that's where painting sometimes can simply "get it" in ways that photographs just cannot.
Pictures number 1 and 2 are a couple of my reminiscences of Costa Rica. You may notice some of the similarities to photographs I have taken, but there is just something more (I think) in the brush strokes, and the layers of paint that oil painting produces. Picture number three is from our first trip to Alaska, and while the photographs from there are wonderful, there was something more that I wanted to say, which I could only say in a painting. Picture number 4 is of a walk that I took in Michigan, and I had no camera with me, so it's purely from memory. Picture number 5 is the oldest one here, and again I had no camera with me, and represents my impressions of a scene from Coshockten, Ohio. Likewise picture number 6 was from a briefly glimpsed scene in West Virginia, which I carried around in my little brain for years before putting in down on canvas. And finally, picture number 7 actually represents three separate scenes that I remember, which I incorporated into one painting (Tennessee, Michigan and Arkansas).