San Juan Cemetery
From April 2020, for a year, I posted on Facebook a painting each day as a brief diversion from the lockdowns and other bad news this year. Neglecting my weblog, I’ll post in the coming days some of my better posts. Some of these paintings are still available.

And now for something totally different.
Mission San Juan Bautista is a Spanish mission in the small town of San Juan Bautista, California. Founded in 1797, the mission was the fifteenth of the Spanish missions established in present-day California. Named for Saint John the Baptist, the mission has served mass daily since 1797, and today functions as a parish church of the Diocese of Monterey.
I have painted the mission a number of times, usually with a group of fellow plein air painters. During one visit, I wandered back behind the mission and found an old graveyard adjacent to the structure. The cemetery holds the remains of over 4,000 Christian Native Americans and Europeans in thousands of unmarked graves who have died over the centuries. It’s not my usual subject matter, but the pattern of old weathered walls along with the eerie foggy mist had an intriguing abstract pattern, so I later did a studio painting of it.
From the “Studio Ndebe Iche”.