To paint or not to paint from a photograph?

During the hot days this summer my husband and I like to make road trips to the Oregon Coast.  When we make a stop, a favorite walk of ours is the Salishan Nature Trail. The daisys are in the parking lot of the Salishan Market Place and Spa.  The trail head almost hidden is in back of the market between the golf course and Siletz bay.



A great view for a picture is always had from the nature trail on a man made dike upon which the trail heads towards Gleneden Beach.  Costal pines frame the shallow bay. Many birds are often sighted. Very nice for painting, not. Many dog owners from the area walk their dog here and the trail is narrow and I do not want to remain on the trail when golfers are unable to control their balls.

The groomed golf course lawn is like a canvas for interesting shaped shadows. Even though the photos are interesting they do not compare with what I could imagine in paint. The darks in my digital photographs are flat dark. In the real world the dark areas contain  greater variety of color hues and relatively light areas.
I could just use the photos to remind me of the place and go home and paint from the photo and memory. I have done that but the number of possible pictures I see and photograph are a problem for me because I go around happily imaging paintings everywhere I look and I have only a few hours to paint and a few surfaces ready for paint.
As incomplete are my photos in comparison to what I might paint, I am happy to photograph what interests me as a fun thing to do as a completely different thing than my usual painting process.


On the dunes of Salishan Ocean Beach I photographed more pictures that excited me. Maybe my peaked interest in lines recently caused me to select subjects that were strongly linear.





The photos of Salishan Gleneden Beach are finished and I have no desire to copy them in paint especially since on this walk I sketched. For awhile I found a log in the shade where I could sit and sketch. This sketch, if I should paint this from memory, contains a useful selection of color values from dark to light, textural patterns, and an interpretattion of movement that is all over the picture. It is an unfinished sketch and could be a guide to important pictorial considerations that  would not show up in a photograph because of either not enough definition in the dark areas or if the darks are visible the light areas would be too light.

 Photos  do not hold

enough of  what I care about.  I like experiencing the place and my own immediate emotional reaction.  I like to feel the energy of the place flow through my body as I draw.

 

Painting a wedding at Waiailea Beach in Hapuna Park, Big Island Hawaii

At the West Hawaii Plein Air Painters event, 9:30 AM, Friday, February 3, Cindy had been painting for almost two hours. Cindy is not in the painting just on my left on the other side of the log from me.  I was also a little early and just starting this painting and Richard had just arrived and was set up to paint. Then the mother of the groom appeared. She wanted us to all move because her son was getting married there in half an hour.

Richard who facilitates the group said there are no reservations on the site and we would not move. 

To make the lady happier, I offered to paint the wedding and give the painting to her. She said she had photographers and never came to look at my painting luckily because it was in a very dull state after three hours. I have put in many hours on it since.

If she changes her mind and finds me, and demonstrates real appreciation, the wedding painting would still be a gift to her.

The 12 x 16 inch painting is over an acrylic painting on canvas that I covered with absorbent ground that accepts watercolor and mixed media. Then I sprayed it with gloss UVprotective Krylon before making changes with acrylics. With the Krylon protection I could remove the acrylic and preserve the under-painting.

The old recycled surface was intended as a warm up painting before the real effort of the day. When the wedding happened, I decided that the iron wood trees made an excellent symbolic frame for the ceremony of joining of two family trees of life.

 My most memorable paintings outdoors are when I am moved by what happens while I am painting. Most paintings include more than one period of time. This painting depicts the father walking the bride and then he was consoling the sister. The bride was painted twice.

The wedding painting is not finished yet. I am working on the expressiveness of the gestures and relationships between the members of the wedding party and how the eye is directed to the wedding.

Help, Help!!! Human Debree tossed in by Hurricanes Threatened to Drown Me and Reef Criters at Turneffe Atoll, Belize

The disappearing beach at one of the mangrove islands
 on Turneffe Atoll,
the largest Atoll in the second largest coral reef in the world

Last year's hurricanes dumped plastic trash  on the beaches of Turneffe Atoll. At one of its islands, pictured above, I saw a plastic baby doll and a pair of  goose barnacle covered flip flops amazingly within a foot of each other.

Last year's hurricanes were the strongest recorded sucking away the sand in the atoll's beaches. The roots of palms were exposed. Some trees fell or will fall in the next hurricane. Some red mangrove trees also were lost reducing the distance between the shore and interior brackish water ponds where crocodiles mate and live.  all along the narrow strip of sand new mangrove shoots poked above the sand. They grow remarkably fast to become the lung of the reef and the most protective plant of the fragile reef. But as remarkable as they are, will they stand a chance if these storms and higher tides are more frequent and pull more sand away from the shore?



I am looking with binoculars across the pond at crocodiles. My granddaughter is in foreground.
Behind me are the black mangroves with roots in the brackish water beginning to be stressed.
Also the distance between the pond and the reef shore is half what it was in 2016.

 Without dry roots the black mangrove trees started dieing.  Not only that the sea level has risen in recent years according to Turneffe Flats Lodge. The atoll is 30 miles long and 18 miles wide at the widest point. The whole system is threatened  including Turneffe Flats Fishing Lodge and Ecotourist Resort.  When we were there for one week the place looked in fine shape. They said within a few weeks after the storms the owners built a new dock, fixed the wood buildings, replaced some of the sand and planted red mangrove trees.  The owners were still in the process of building a much stronger two story cement structure partly to increase the number of client rental rooms and partly for their new home.

Me in my 180 degree snorkeling mask.
The mask worked fine when on the surface
but near the end of snorkeling I attempted to dive down.  The  mask started to fill with water.
To make the water flow out I simply looked down and lost track of the group resulting in an interesting  but unpleasant experience.  I became a little separated from the group.

My sympathy for all critters of the reef was made greater after this unpleasant experience.  The currents around the atoll created a trash line about a hundred yards from open ocean with higher waves.  I swam through the trash accidentally when I was left behind and didn't look up enough to see where I was going. I was fascinated by a big jelly fish. I was pulled a little off course by an increasingly stronger current on my way to the boat pulling me closer and closer to the colder ocean. Then I got to experience first hand how fish and critters could be trapped surrounded by plastic bags,  broken floating sea weed and the little box jelly fish I feared.  I told myself not to panic, but just go with the flow gradually shifting directions towards the boat.  When I was parallel to the starboard of the boat, I  made a right turn and started swimming hard towards the boat.  My plan was to  pass the boat and go around the anchor rope and head back for the ladder near the aft on the port side of the boat.  Making headway was difficult.  My daughter saw me and thought I was lost and came around to me and tugged at my hand to get me to turn towards the stern instead.

 I welcomed our role reversal and am so grateful my daughter is so wonderfully caring.

What is being done and can be done?

A big part of being able to experience being on a remote atoll is consumption of energy like petroleum. To reduce the amount needed, some have tried wind and solar power. But unfortunately there isn't a good way to protect  the delicate machinery from high tides and winds of hurricanes. At least a method hasn't been invented yet.

There is a little house on the tip of one of the mangrove islands where adventurous people come to stay without electricity, or a supply of water or any food other than what they can collect, catch or gather - survival tourism anyone?

Turneffe Flats had their own green house where they grew herbs, onions and peppers. Many of their foods were purchased from organic Mennonite farmers from the mainland of Belize.

Our adventure guide, Abel Coe, wants to educate Belize school children to value their natural resources by taking them out in the morning to help pick up the trash and then take them snorkeling in the afternoon. I hope he is supported in his mission.

The owners of Turneffe Flats are trying to make Turneffe Atoll a Belize National Monument and Nature Preserve. A portion of the money we paid for staying at the fishing resort went to ecology efforts. They do not use micro-wave and other high powered appliances. use solar pannels to heat shower water. Limit hours of air conditioning. They also recycle black water, and collect rain water, use salt water in their infinity pool among other eco friendly practices..

Surge, a marine biologist, and the dive guide is promoting ecology world foundations.
Call to scientific inventors: design equipment for atoll dwellers to convert plastic to fuel. Anyone, can you make a small island friendly machine to convert algae to biofuel?

Brainstorming anyone for more ideas!




the cove

The last week of April found us finally at the coast with longtime friends. We had been scheduled to go the first of April but then Ranch Boss and I got sick with that cough thing. The owner let us switch our dates to the end of the month which gave us three nights at the cove. Time there is magical, as is time with friends we've known since our youth. The weather changed constantly with storms passing through and the sunshine reappearing. Storms at the coast are special times to be there.

The only disappointing aspect was the starfish were gone from the tidal pools. We've read how a disease has killed them off all along the coastline of western North America. The belief is this is due to a warming ocean where diseases pose new risks to the creatures depending on the seas. The starfish at the cove were colorful and wonderful to photograph. I hope they make a comeback. 

The Cove

some thoughts

This has been one of those weeks that hasn't worked as I planned as much as I plan anything. I had an idea for writing the weekly blog but frankly lost track of what I'd say. 

My outside-activities involved the dentist for a cleaning and exam. No new cavities, but I have another tooth that eventually needs a crown because of a crack. It also though will need a root canal, which complicates it as it's a wisdom tooth. My regular dentist will do the crown but not the canal... Given the trouble I had with the last crown, I want to put this off until I have my schedule more planned-- which is not now. The dentist said it should be fine if I just don't chew with it on anything hard or sticky. I think I can resist-- especially on the sticky part. That, with taffy, used to lead to broken teeth before!


Involving my work, the main project was finishing the editing of Diablo Canyon. I am happy with it and its three novellas making one book; plus the idea Farm Boss (their publisher) had for putting the three novella covers in front of each chapter. 

Being someone into metaphysics, dreams, and mythologies, I am pleased with how this book came together. The ideas blended so well that you'd think they had been planned all along. Well, if anyone planned it, it was my muse-- not me. Anyway the editing is done, and I hope its last edit. I caught no more errors and neither did Amazon when it went up. Next step is getting the paperback version ready to go.

Fall is finally beginning to look as though it is here even though officially the equinox is Monday and it's still quite warm outside. This week we had a delightful, light rain but need more to get past the fire danger. We are though heading into the time of shorter and shorter days, fires in the fireplace, cleaning up the garden, selling the lambs and calves and looking forward to the Solstice when it will all start again. Frankly we had a great summer here in my part of Oregon if we can just avoid fires now.

Farm Boss and I celebrated a big anniversary or one that used to seem big-- a 50th. It doesn't seem so big to me anymore as I know so many who have been married 50 and more years. We didn't actually do anything special for it partly because I don't know if a long marriage is so much to someone's credit as it is luck. If you stay together all those years and are still best friends, that's very fortunate. Do you then throw a big party and take credit for it or is it pure fate? Yes, I am a bit of a fatalist. No, I'm not more of one after writing Diablo Canyon. That book just reflected a lot of what I think anyway. Happy endings are out there but life can take some very abrupt left turns.

Otherwise, I am into editing the third of the Oregon historicals and enjoying this one a lot as I have found a few nuances to the story that I missed with its first draft. I had forgotten some of the details and that has made editing a time of discovery. It won't be the last edit if I do opt to publish it-- still undecided on the Oregon historicals but they will come out as paperbacks when the fourth one is ready and after a LOT of edits.

What I had planned to write about for this blog was what it's like to have a creative friendship, where you share interest in each other's work. I haven't had a lot of those. Many of my friends have been into many interesting things but not the fine arts or serious writing. It's not essential for a friendship; but when I have one where we share the pitfalls and joys of creative work, it does make the work seem less lonely. It is someone to bounce ideas off and have them truly understand the complexity of what is being considered.

I am not sure why I've had so few deep friendships that involved creativity (maybe living a country life is part of that), but when I have one, I consider it something to protect. Of course, if you have a creative friendship, you know it can also be argumentative as you discuss the work and disagree sometimes. It's though argumentative in a good way, not the angry but rather the debating kind.

Anyway a few pictures from such a friendship and last week. When we were at the beach, while Farm Boss and Fisherman went off to the river, Diane and I had some great times to chat about a ton of subjects. She also said wanted to paint me. She has done this several times over the years. I figured all I had to do was sit, and we could talk as she worked. Of course, she had her own idea on the exact pose, but it only required a slight adjustment in terms of how I would naturally sit. Ours, with this couple, is a fifty year friendship that has woven past two weddings, kids, grandkids, and finally to today when we get together sometimes on mini-breaks.

 A lovely time at the beach...

 

a beach interlude

With all but one of my books re-edited, I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. In another week I can begin to write something new again-- yahoo! Or maybe I'll take a break from my own writing and read some of the many books i have accumulated on my Kindle. I do love those devices where I can set them into folders and have something for any mood. I like reading on it but when I am doing my own writing/editing, I don't read much for pleasure although I read non-fiction and research. Some of the avoidance of pleasure reading is not wanting to be influenced by what another author wrote. It's easy to have that happen and, when writing, you are even recommended to not read at all in your own genre.

While editing, I like to take breaks to avoid words running together. Recently I got the idea of finding one word to depict the challenge in each of my novels as well as the one each couple faces in their relationship if it's to work out. That is not easy to do, and maybe I can't do it justice, but it's been a useful word exercise. As a writer, I think it's beneficial to narrow down as much as possible the reason each book exists. Coming up with few words can be more challenging than writing a lot of them. Words are a writer's tools-- but lots of them usually ;)

We had a break in the middle of this week, as Farm Boss was invited to go out on a friend's boat. The salmon are making their fall run up the coastal rivers. The couple are long term friends. They head down there every year for a month or two, staying in their motor coach. She paints, and he goes out almost every day-- often taking friends or family members. Needless to say after all those years on this river, he makes a good guide.

For Farm Boss and me to stay, I found a house right on Gleneden beach. We invited our friends to spend time there with us when not fishing. So I had a very enjoyable time watching the surf as it changed throughout the day. There is something so incredibly soothing about the ocean. I enjoy it in storm or as this was with sunshine and some breeze. We even got to see whales spout which can entertain a person for a long time as you have to constantly look for that telltale spout. Farm Boss captured them with the telephoto but so far out that it didn't make for a good photo. Still a fun thing to see them and imagine the pod out there circling and finding their food-- maybe also migrating as they do.

Although this is a long sandy beach, it had more interesting wave action than I was expecting. The house was perfect for photos as it looked down on the waves with the light changing all day. September is usually good weather on the Oregon Coast. Our three days were absolutely perfect. I didn't do any editing but a break was a good idea before I dive into that last book.

The photos below are from Gleneden and the Siletz River. As always it's hard to narrow it down to just a few. I am going to save the ones of our friends and us for next Saturday where it will accompany a discussion of what it's been like to have a friendship over over fifty years between two creative women, with different interests, but who encourage and enjoy what the other does. Let's just say it's not predictable-- in a good way.

 faithful dog watching his owner trying to surf

 Siletz River-- early morning

Inspiration for a garden

I have to say my garden is not nearly this tidy. I admire very much the family that keeps this home looking as much as possible like its owner created. As anyone, who has a garden, knows-- gardens head toward chaos if not tended. This garden is lovingly tended. They invited any renters to weed but I didn't see a weed. Back or front garden, each showed balance, sense of humor and a love of nature.

and a back garden