Maybe it’s due to emergence from SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) but I am thrilled about some of the paintings I’ve been working on lately.
One painting is Bobcat in the Shrub-steppe which is a very old painting, originally finished in 2004. It was kind of a sad story, why I ever painted it. A very wonderful customer had purchased my old 1983 Bobcat painting that was one of the first two prints I ever printed in color. He was exceedingly pleased with the painting and he kindly let me know this in correspondence (He wasn’t in Seattle.) But it was lost in a house fire. As a beautiful gesture from a spouse, his wife commissioned me to do another Bobcat. I did this painting, but I have trouble finishing things on time and the painting didn’t look like this then and wasn’t really done when she got it. She was very kind at the time but I knew in my heart that it wasn’t going to hold a candle to the memory of the deceased painting, which has always been a favorite for customers. I resolved after that to never do commissions: I never want to see disappointment in the eyes of a customer.
But while looking at the image in the store the other day, I got the idea to darken the sky. For me, it rectifies a flaw in the original version, and it answers the yellow sage and grass with a purple sky, the complementary opposite of yellow. It also gives the painting depth. I’m loving this version and I’m going to publish this picture soon in various sizes.
This is the current most recent version of Orcas in the Salish Sea. That’s a Bonaparte’s Gull flying and on the rock a Mew Gull with Black Oystercatchers. I love this, I have yet to find out if anyone else is going to like it.
I’ve blogged about my Red-crowned Parrot painting before. I feel I’m making steady progress, painting the old-fashioned way, with paint and brush. This gorgeous bird is deeply endangered and the flock of feral birds in Brownsville Texas may represent it’s best chance of survival, (i.e., doing what it was ordered to do in Genesis 1-23) so don’t mess it up with a wall.
Maybe 20 years ago we were up in Deer Harbor on Orcas Island and there was an inlet where kayaks had been pulled up on to the mud. I thought it was the perfect freebie in the way of a painting idea so I clicked away madly with my camera so as not to “forget” the image. However, that was long before digital cameras and the one thing I had didn’t have in the camera was film. Recently I was at Eagle Harbor and the scene there reminded me of that moment.
There were no kayaks, however. I see I’m going to reposition the second kayak. I may be in for a long struggle on this, but the thought of that makes me irrationally happy.
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