Sometimes you've just got to have a little color around...

Toward the end of 2010 a couple of friends decided to do a drawing or sketch a day in the new year. Starting January first, we drew... and drew... and drew. At first I emailed mine to a few folks who indicated an interest, but that was cumbersome, so a friend suggested I post them to a blog.

Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's a bit of a slog, but many times it's black, white and grey - the drawings can be in colored pencil but often they're in pen or graphite...

Sometimes I'd just as soon paint!

It is possible to click on any of the paintings to enlarge the view.

Aug 30, 2011

It's a Wet, Blue World (three)

 
     This one, Storm Wake, is also oil (21" x 27"). Ostensibly, it shows a confused sea in the wake of a storm. I referenced it - with permission - from Galen Rowell's photo "Wild Seas of the Drake Passage to Antarctica"... using the photo for the general wave and cloud formations... and then added the retreating rain, the distant land and the bottle in order to play upon the feeling of promise or hope presented by the breaking light. 
     Partly in order to enrich the close-up water surface (natural surfaces are often fractal in nature in that as you move closer they continue to present further elaboration), and partly due to some fabulously complex wine, I enjoyed a long, peaceful time of doodling intricately with the foam trails and breaks. 
     Only much later, while photographing and contemplating the wakes left in the water by a motor boat, did I realize the waves I'd been referencing were not, strictly, "confused seas" but rather the result of a motor boat wake left among the waves it was (naturally) cutting across diagonally. Of course! Mr. Rowell was, no doubt, in a motored boat on those waters. My original working title - referring to the atmosphere in the wake of a storm at sea - was still fine, and those waves could be "confused seas" absent any boat-bound observer... but the realization added a second layer of meaning. It's not only the wake of the storm but a nod to the liquid wake captured by Mr. Rowell.

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