Middle Fork under Mt. Si

The Middle Fork became one of my favorite tenkara rivers this year.  While I used to drive up 10 miles of terrible road to fish up near the Pratt or Taylor River confluences this year I stuck to the area around North Bend a lot.   Guess what, bigger fish and I never saw another fisherman unless they were with me.   This spot was very good every time I went there and I got to fish with a great view of Si the whole time.

Back to acrylics today so I’m even with five acrylics and five oils at the 33% done point.  Going back was a bit tough but I used a lot of drying retarder to be able to handle the paint wet a bit longer.  Still the thin nature of acrylic is so different than the thick richness of oils but I’m getting used to it and I think this is my best acrylic to date during the challenge.

Evan’s Creek

Evan’s Creek Preserve is the closest place to our house that has trails for a quick walk or run so we go there frequently and do at least the two mile loop.  On Wednesday afternoon the sun broke out so we headed out for a walk.  The orchard area was on fire with color and I decided that I had to paint this tree.

Again used oils for this one.  Pretty happy with everything except the central red tree. It is just hard to get the brightness of the tree correct and I ended up using pure cad red for the highlights which didn’t quite work.  Adding white turned it into a nasty pink and yellow got it too orange so I tried to darken up the darks with a mix of alizarin crimson and burnt umber and used a glaze of alizarin over the cad red highlights to try and get the more scarlet color back.

Fall at Tanner Landing

I’ve been escaping the fog by driving to North Bend much of the last week and fishing the Middle Fork.   This is the view at Tanner Landing Park right now looking south towards Rattlesnake Mountain.   This seemed like an appropriate subject today since tomorrow we’ll be doing the Rattlesnake traverse.

Again oils today.  I did the underpainting in burnt umber then built up several layers of thin paint with a lot of medium before finishing off the trees with pretty pure cad yellow and red with a touch of alizarin crimson and lemon yellow.  The paint is very thin aside from the trees which needed the heavier paint to hold their form. I was tempted to take a palette knife to the trees and smear them ala Gerhard Richter but decided I liked the painting the way it was for now, maybe I’ll do another of this area from a slightly different perspective and smear it.  Over 25% done already, doesn’t seem possible and I’m at half oils/half acrylics.  I know I’ll need to switch back to all acrylic soon so things can dry in time but for now I’m enjoying using oils.

Fog on Lower David Powell

The fog is still with us here in Seattle.  This morning I decided to just get out and enjoy it and headed to the Snoqualmie River at daybreak to fish what was my favorite stleelhead run a few years ago when there were summer hatchery fish.   On the hope that a few wild fish are in the system now I decided to hit it but mainly I was tuning up my spey casting for a trip to the Wenatchee.

I arrived to a heron fishing the top of the run.  There were pink salmon carcasses littering the shoreline and gravel bars on the river plus a few on their last fin fighting the currents.  As I moved through the run casting, swinging and stepping down  I saw a few much larger tails and fins in the water, coho or kings still moving up river to spawn.   A raptor flew overhead.  A kingfisher was chattering and buzzed along the shoreline and a water ouzel was dipping into the water by some rocks.   I fished to the end of the run and carefully fished my favorite rock where I’ve had grabs from a dozen steelhead over the years.   I had one trout grab that woke me up but that was it for action. Steelhead fishing is always more about being out in the river than actually catching fish and is a very meditative way to start the day.

Since I had the foggy palette leftover from yesterday’s painting I just decided to go ahead and paint the river from this morning today.  I had to add in a bit of cad yellow and red to the palette to get the closer leaves.   Not quite as happy with this one as yesterday, I keep tweaking at it but am going to stop for now, maybe I’ll revisit it later in the week.

I can’t believe I’m a week into the 30-Day Challenge already, about one quarter of the way done.   It has been going by pretty quickly and so far I haven’t gotten stuck trying to figure out what to do.

Fog at the Narrows

Seattle has been stuck in a fog bank for the last few days and it brought back a morning last month when a group of fly fishers led by Leland Miyawaki headed to Narrows Park to fish for coho.  We arrived to find a thick fog covering Puget Sound, visibility was about 50′ at best.  I got this shot heading north from the park to a spot where I usually have good luck in the winter with resident fish.  Believe it or not, the Tacoma Narrows bridge is just out there past the last tree but was totally hidden in the fog.  It was a fun morning out on the beach, I had one grab but I don’t think anyone actually caught a fish.

This was another oil painting using a very small palette – lots of titanium white, sap green, alizaran crimson, ultramarine blue, burnt umber and a touch of raw sienna for the sand.  I covered the canvas with a layer of ‘fog’ using white, green & crimson.  Then I worked up the darker colors on the shore from there.

Yakima Canyon meets Mark Rothko

This painting was inspired a few years ago by a post entitled Art is Everywhere from my fly fishing photographer friend Louis Cahill.  He noticed that the landscape along the Henry’s Fork actually looked a lot like a painting from his favorite painter, Mark Rothko.   While I was in the Yakima Canyon a few weeks ago I too noticed the similarity.   A few nights ago, thinking about this whole painting thing I realized I had planned to do a lot of pretty typical landscapes and wondered what would happen if I tried to take a traditional landscape and turn it into a Rothko all in one canvas.  That turned into today’s experiment.

I used oils today, I knew I had enough time left for them to try.  I used a pretty limited palette of water soluble oils – yellow ochre, burnt umber, aliziran crimson, ultramarine & phthalo blue, sap green and lemon yellow.  I used quite a bit of medium to keep the paint very transparent on the majority of the canvas adding layer after layer of transparent color. After I had the basic colors on very thin I began adding fuller paint to the left side of the canvas turning it into more of a traditional landscape while leaving the right side very Rothko-like.   I added titanium white to the palette at this point.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the way this turned out and maybe I’ll try to do a few more abstracted landscapes over the course of the month.  I was also very happy to be using oils again, they just ‘feel’ so much better than acrylics do.

Yakima Canyon #2

Up early again for another painting from the Yakima Canyon trip a few weeks ago, there will be more. I’m still stuck in E.WA since I don’t want to deal with all the green over here quite yet.  Green is my nemesis when it comes to painting.  This was mid-day as the sun started breaking through and the clouds began breaking up.   I don’t think I caught any trout from this spot though.

I dreamt about painting last night so I can tell this is on my mind day and night.   I’ve been painting for 7 days straight which is the most I’ve done in years and it has evidently sunk into my subconscious now.   So far these first three days have gone pretty smooth.  Last night Catherine and I were discussing it and I wondered if at some point I’ll “hit the wall” like people do in a real marathon.   For some reason I never hit the wall in any of the marathons or even the 50k I’ve done, so maybe there will be no wall in the remaining 27 days of painting.

Yakima Canyon #1

I wanted to start with a painting that would have colors I’m used to dealing with since I wasn’t used to acrylic paint so I chose one from the Yakima Canyon.  This was from a trip last week when I went over to fish the canyon water and to find some bighorn sheep.

The dry time on the acrylic is both good and bad.  It was easier to do washes to build up the colors in the hills instead of mixing wet into wet as with oils but there were quite a few times that I went for a color and it was already hard on the palette.   Detail on these small canvases is definitely easier with acrylic than oils since it isn’t as prone to just blending in with whatever is there already.   I feel pretty good knocking this out in two hours and think I’ve got a good start to the month though I’ll probably still tweak this a bit over the coming days.