Chautauqua Lake and its surrounding countryside is an amazing place to be for an artist like me who fell in love early on with the quiet beauty of the natural world. There are extraordinary visual inspirations to be found even in the most mundane things that surround us. How many times, for example, have we all driven past that swampy area along East Summit that appears to be a mess of broken trees and boggy weeds? My artist's eyes saw instead a "Faerie Fen" and that is what my painting of that tangled swamp reveals.