Daily Musings

November 30th.

I managed to get outside. Late in the day. The sun was low and shafts of light sliced across the garden and the old driveway here Sea View. As I blocked in my design, I lost the bands of light as it clouded over. I continued on, knowing that I’d probably get another view of the light effects as the clouds drifted by, reminding myself that I could now see more into the shadows in the new gloom and to adjust accordingly. Sure enough, the light returned, dancing through the trees again for just long enough. I finished the painting in twilight but with all the essentials already down.

November 29th.

Another studio day, with errant weather outside and little desire to paint from inside the van as on previous occasions. I again worked up a different slant from some recent Dailies. These paintings are slightly larger than the rest of this year’s dailies: 8” x 6”. A bargain!  The piece with the two palms with a feint moon in a blue sky, I used to make a full nocturne, darkening the trees and adding a few moonlit highlights on their edges. The windy palm I added a break in the grey sky, a fissure of light for added drama.

November 28th.

Wicked winds outside, so I snuggled up in the studio with my paintings and studies around me. I worked from a piece that I painted during the plein air festival a few weeks ago. It’s fairly small, 6” x 8”, and was done from the road overlooking  Horseshoe Bay. There was a lot of sheen on the water as I looked into the sun. It was, I think, one of the better efforts this year and has captured something of the mood of the day. In my studio, I have as much time as I like to work up a piece. The light is constant, nothing is moving, there is coffee. I strive to keep a freshness and looseness within the piece even though I have this additional time. That’s not to say that there may be more brush strokes and areas may be tighter; it’s finding that balance of drilling into a plein air study, extracting the information, perhaps adding a few elements from memory, but not painting out all the expressive qualities present in the original piece.

November 27th.

A short ride from the house, I was met by this really lovely view of Cambridge Beaches from across Somerset Long Bay. The water was mirror calm when I began, with crisp Winter clarity in the air. It’s tricky to incorporate the foreground interplay in the translucent water with a stretch of sea behind and to also feature the busy peninsula in the background, but I gave it a good shot.

November 26th.

I rode on one of the new bicycles that we have bought for our guest rental cottage, which has a cavernous basket up front that swallowed my paint box. The Dutch style beach cruiser geometry of the bike was perfect for scanning painting spots as I rolled on by.  I chose to paint the view down East Shore Road looking towards Mangrove Bay, a complex composition with a lot going on. I was careful not to try and include everything, but say enough to make the painting talk back. It did. It’s a pretty chatty piece.  As I finished, a group of kids just out of school walked up the hill chatting even more enthusiastically. I saddled up and rolled back down into the painting.

November 25th.

A walk over to Mangrove bay in the fading light. I set up and painted some of the boats, with no horizon or foreshore. The colours were soft and deepened as I painted, finally finishing in the twilight.

November 24th.

I tramped around for a while by the seashore, a bit listless and not settling on anything. I detoured alongside a neighbour’s house and found inspiration. The variations in the roof shadows were surprising; the apex of the chimney so dark against the sky, like yesterday’s roof line. The painting is really an observation on the variation in relative values, the warm and cool light cast on similar objects. The painting reminds me of a Chris Marson water colour. Subject and design, I guess. Either way that makes me happy. 😁

November 23rd.

The same orientation as my daily from November 19^th, zoomed more into focus on the edge of the tamarisk and the background this time. The sun was out and dazzling my eyes as it bounced off the water. I was still able to read the value recession and pick out nuance in the edges of the bushes in the distance. The roof of the yellow cottage near the shore appeared as a warm blue, while the roof of the house on the skyline was a much darker grey blue. Of course, in reality the Bermuda roofs are white; it’s the colours your eye perceive relative to what’s around them that changes it up.

November 22nd.

Dramatic contrast. sunlit white roofs against a bruising sky. I painted here before a few weeks ago in the evening. I lost the light 20 minutes in and had to work from memory to finish. A second studio piece using a daily that’s all but abstract. Working at softness in edges and value.

November 21st.

Working in the studio with Mozart and Moby for company, I used a selection of recent country road paintings to work up a fresh piece. Outside, a North wind was howling, bringing cold, clear air with it. Out of the studio doors I could see palm trees across at the hotel swaying and leaning in the weather. I painted one, which was way off in the distance, where you can’t see detail.  It’s more an impression, but sometimes that’s the best way.

November 20th.

I got back from town just as the sun was setting, raced down to the beach and hurriedly set up. As I began to paint, the clouds were all lit up in roses and pinks by a sun that was now below the horizon. I worked for perhaps 25 minutes, grabbing what I could from the sky as the clouds faded to blue greys.

November 19th.

I painted the bay from under the cover of Breezes restaurant, which is now put away for the season. Not because it was raining, but because it offers shade and continuity to the light, which plays havoc on your eyes when it’s fading in and out.  I focused on the distant shore, with a lead in of the beach and tamarisk bushes. The recession values were tricky in the distance, everything actually looked pretty flat in reality. Maybe the clear cool light?  Perhaps I should have faded the background more to emphasize recession? Not to say it’s wrong, just that there are options.

November 18th.

It’s been a good while since I wandered out to the country lanes to paint, I think not since before the summer trip to Europe. Back then, I painted a whole series of Dailies featuring the profusion of oleander and other colourful flowers that were blooming in the late Spring. Now much of the colour is drained as a result of the recent hurricane. Things are greening up and the flowers are making a comeback, but the difference is marked. I painted at Tween Walls, a lane that always offers so much potential but is actually tricky to paint. The best views are gained from standing in the middle of the road, but that’s not practical as vehicles do use it, and the light falls awkwardly almost along the length of the lane for most of the year. The shadows seem to whip from one side to the other, or disappear from overhead light, whenever I paint there. It always draws me back though, with its Prosper Senat feel and old world charm.

November 17th.

Continuing on with my “Daily from a Daily” angle this afternoon, I worked up two more pieces based on Daniel’s Head. It’s fun and exciting to transpose the information from the location pieces, without the time pressure of working outside, where things morph by the second. It gives me the opportunity to play around with and push elements of design, mood and drama. I think these sessions will help me access ideas for larger works in due course.

November 16th.

I took a selection of recent location paintings, some Dailies, others completed during the Plein Air Festival, and propped them on the studio easel. I chose one of them and used the energy and information captured on location to make a new painting. It was a guide to make a new piece, with a different but similar feel, rather than simply copying the previous work. I added the suggestion of a channel marker. Memories of time on the water or staring out to sea stored somewhere in my subconscious helped give today’s version a new twist.

November 15th.

Tamarisk. Deceptively spindly and frail. The first line of defense on the beach against waves. Salt resistant, gnarly, tough. Purple blue vibrating shadows, a suggestion of footprints in the sand.

November 14th.

I’ve been working on a larger painting in the studio using two of my dailies for studies. Tonight, I painted the painting of the paintings. Art imitating life imitating art.

November 13th.

A midday session painting the storm clouds as they came on shore. I worked fast to beat the rain, perhaps twenty-five minutes in all. Sometimes that’s all you need and the conditions do you the favour of stopping you overworking the painting.

November 12th.

Back in the studio I’m busy working on a sun-saturated painting. It’s on my mind. I just got back from trying to take down notes of the low sun in the water. It’s not easy. You paint somewhat blind, and despite the calm water, things are still in a state of flux. Water, the sun and the light move and morph. The calm water also seems to throw up even more intense light than a chop. There was a fly fisherman working the shallows in search of bone fish. He moved too. These little paintings I do trying to capture light effects are right on the cusp of what I can manage. They are very true, if raw. A record of stimuli and a moment with little regard for “a picture” I walked back to the house pretty dazzled. When I grow up, I’d like to be able to use these memories and records to create huge colour fields of saturated light, but then painting is a strange and fickle journey that may set me on a path to something completely different at the next fork in the road.

November 11th.

Initially, I had quite a bit of trouble sorting out the brighter areas of the water this morning. I seemed to run out of high notes. To help resolve this I went back and subdued some of the cooler temperatures to give me some more wiggle room.  Basically, the water is all pretty bright here in the shallows, so to get variation and recession you are working within a very thin slice of the tonal range. I added a suggestion of a couple of bathers in the distance who had been there when I started but had left by the time I got to working them in.

November 10th.

Investigating varieties in whites.

November 9th.

Painting outdoors was a non-starter with the first Winter storm raging out of the North East. I set up in the house and painted the muted light filtering into one of the bedrooms, the “Bowie suite” where David and Iman slept when they lived here.  I had enough illumination behind me to leave the light in the room off, leaving the single light source for the painting coming in through the window. I wasn’t able to depict exact colours in the gloom, but there was enough to pick out tone.

November 8th.

A sultry afternoon. A view towards the old eco village, top-light on the roofs of the tents on stilts. It was pretty tricky to dial in the darks today. With atmospheric perspective and the salty air, the values so far away were super close. The sky was largely washed out of colour but still had clear highlights and shadows. A good challenge to take on.

November 7th.

After a busy and productive day in the studio, this evening it was nice to get out into the open air to paint. After a day of hard rain, the sky lifted to leave brooding clouds drifting around in the faintest of breezes aloft, whilst down at sea level the water was like a mirror. I picked up on the reflections of some of the clouds that unfurled almost to my feet, undisturbed but for the odd lazy ripple that added interest to their shapes. I used the edge of the peninsula to slice through the water, dark against the pastel colours.  Afterwards I went for a swim, then watched the show as the evening light, using the darkening clouds as a counterpoint, kept giving and giving. A slow-motion silent firework display.

November 6th.

Rain was forecast to set in for the day, so I used my morning session to work on an area I’m exploring in the studio: portraying the saturated light conditions when the sun shines off the surface of the ocean. I used a couple of dailies that were painted earlier in the year in such conditions, along with a large, partially worked, 40 x 30 studio piece, as well as another location study painted quite a few years ago on the coast of Maine. I’m exploring including the silhouettes of optimist sail boats to the mix to add further movement to the scene, as well as giving the eye a perception of scale on these flat plane, colour-field type works. The opti pram dinghy is a motif that turns up in many of my paintings and means a lot to me both as a familiar Bermuda icon and a metaphysical presence representing aloneness, independence and navigating one’s way through the waters of life. I noted in the morning studio work my brush strokes are drifting into pointillism. It wasn’t a conscious decision and just sort of happened that way. 

In the late afternoon there was an opportunity to get outside, so I stayed with the theme for my Daily and tried to capture the light, looking into the sun at the bay. It was fast moving conditions with the clouds intermittently shielding and exposing the sun, but on completion I was pretty pleased to have captured and recorded some of the energy of the scene.

November 5th.

Another session utilizing the reflections of the cottages at Cambridge Beaches cast as a tapestry of colour and movement in the shallows. I pulled a palm forward a few meters from its real-life location and used its shadow on the building to add depth to the painting. A hint of the turquoise sea beyond the bluff.

November 4th.

I painted two of the three sisters that stand on the boundary of Sea View. I have featured them in several previous dailies, usually painted earlier in the day, today it was early evening. The half-moon was visible and the palms were catching the warm glow of the sun sinking behind me over at the beach.

November 3rd.

Daniel’s Head, my muse.  Close in this gorgeous, calm winter morning.  Softly, softly.  A duck for company.

November 2nd.

The porch at Sea View.  Mid-day shade, but with some sun streaming through the skylight.

November 1st.

This morning I did a larger location painting for the Quick Art competition here at Cambridge Beaches. I took a break in the afternoon and returned to within a few metres of my earlier location to complete my daily. There was a nice rich evening light, the sea was calm, and there were some cool reflections on the surface of the water. To incorporate that I went with a portrait orientation.