Anyone who knows me has seen my sketchbooks, volumes of them at this point, in which I capture the gesture of a place. Most recently working with thin marker and watercolor, I especially like the motion of an urban environment, and I use color and line to record often very busy scenes. Here in Port Townsend, the docks and boatyards offer that kind of merry visual chaos. I like the challenge of conveying a sense of the detail, without being literally exact. There’s a hand-eye synergy that is happening as I look, and draw, look and draw.
Last Thanksgiving, we took our Ford E350 Econoline (beloved “Commander Cody”) to the west coast of the Olympic Peninsula. We camped at a place called Hobuck Beach, located near Cape Flattery, on the Makah Reservation. It’s the western-most point of the contiguous United States. A remote and beautiful place, known for surfing, fishing and rain.
Now here’s a kind of visual richness that is not man-made. That has a motion and a detail of wave and water that is as impossible to literally capture as the most complex urban environment in action. I surrendered to looseness, and took great liberties in simplifying water edge, rock shape, wave action. It was great fun. What I painted seems to me to be a true expression of the wild water, the ever changing clouds and the expanse of fine sand.
I hope to use the little 6×6 inch paintings as inspirational starting points for latex enamel paintings some time. I like the idea of exploring an abstract direction. But, for me, the small pieces stand on their own. They make me happy when I look at them. Maybe that’s because they remind me of natural wonder, that blessed time on the beach, feeling some rare sun, and painting loosely. You can see these framed, hanging on the walls of the lovely Gallery 9, on Water Street in Port Townsend.