Traveling through Europe can provide a welcome change of scenery! And since ‘scenery’ is what I do these days, that also means a new source of inspiration for my work.

Here at home, I’m generally drawn to ‘big’ scenery: vast expanses of dessert; mountains as far as the eye can see; miles of rocky coast; towering glass skyscrapers. Europe has its share of these big scenes, but the welcome change for me as an artist is the chance to capture some of the unique charm and beauty that it has to offer: villages nestled by a river; castles high on a hillside; floating houses moored in a narrow canal.

Windmills are the subject of several images in this gallery. If you look hard enough you can find windmills here and there around the States. There’s even a couple not far from where I used to live in San Francisco. But the windmills in the Netherlands aren’t just tourist attractions, they are a way of life for the people who live, yes live, in them. It takes over a year or training in order to qualify to live in and operate a windmill. Even then, the wait for one to become available can take years. And once you settle in, you have to operate the mill a minimum number of hours per year.

Of course, it isn’t necessary to travel to a different continent to experience a change of scenery. And sometimes, inspiration can come from looking at familiar places and things from a different point of view, or time of day, or day of the year. Claude Monet painted nearly 100 scenes of different views of the Thames River in a few short months.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this change of scenery that inspired the images in this gallery.