Without realizing it, I did something just like this exactly a year ago. This one – I can’t seem to take a picture of it without a distracting glare that ill affects the balance of the painting. It’s a moody kind of scene, from a moody kind of day.
Lake of the Woods
Twilight Between Storms
Approaching Onawee
July 3rd & 4th, 2012
Although this was done out doors, thus could be called “Plein Air,” I was working from a photo and memory and whim. Well whim is too light a word for it, my spirits had sunk as I was pondering how my once pristine, quiet paradise of the Island has become overrun with loud boats, loud people, cabins where there were only trees, docks where there were only deer runs. I know the universe trends to destruction and I know I’m as much a cause of it as anyone. I hope that there is a heaven where all the ideal and perfect remain and grow better, the inverse of this system. In the meantime, I love to contemplate the storms that make us all alone and equally vulnerable to a nature that is bigger and stronger than anyone likes to consider. I love the chaos of clouds and water and the order that ricochets through them. And as much as saying so may convict me by a jury of my peers, I like painting water and sky from photographs. Studying a single moment in time, a snap shot of water and atmosphere stilled, is so invaluable to understanding the behavior and pattern of reflection, refraction, buoyancy and motion. Although I am converted to believe painting outdoors in the moment is the only and best way to paint a landscape, I am not a fundamentalist who eschews our technical capacities as unworthy. If we are able to isolate a moment in time to study water, I will undertake the education.
Twilight, Lake of the Woods
It was a very wet weekend so although I did paint this outdoors (in a gazebo) it is of a view that was a long way from where I stood in MA.
April 17th, 2012
This is a birch tree, and the funny light that comes in a clearing between two storms. Although I don’t like painting from photos, I was homesick for the lake (Lake of the Woods, Ontario, Canada) so I painted it.