My Morning View

C1564

"Above the Chetco early morning Mist"

(Siskiyou National Forest, near Brookings, Oregon Coast)

Oil Sketch on Centurion Oil Primed Linen Panel

With additional coat of Williamsburg Lead Primer

5" x 7"

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(Take Note: for those of you who have signed up to be notified by email of new postings to this blog, you have been receiving not just a notification, but an actual copy of the new blog posting as the email. As this does not show the images of the paintings in the best possible light, you should click on the title of the latest posting, to open up the actual blog itself, and enjoy the paintings at their best.)

I have taken my laptop into Frys, and it must be sent off to repair the screen; it appears the "backscreen" has failed, and I will be 6 to 8 weeks without it. It took a few days to travel back north up the coast, painting here and there, and so there is a time gap between doing the actual paintings and when they are posted in this journal, especially so relying only on my newish tablet to get the job done. Patience is a virtue, so they say, so in the meantime let us all be highly virtuous. Ahhh ... I love the smell of virtue in the morning; it smells like ... Victory!*

The first several mornings in my campsite a few miles up in the mountains above Brookings, I have awoken to mist in the valleys below, sometimes even surrounding my camp, to later burn off in the mrning sun. The above painting gives an idea of what I arise to each day, with the dawn light gilding the tree tops, and yet to touch the mist in the Chetco River valley below. It was a Monday when I stayed in camp and painted this scene. I had thought about it since the first morning ai camped here, but it took the first windy day experienced in Brookings for me to decide to retreat to the hills instead of braving the wind (yet again) of the coast; the wind lasted for four days. The forest is usually not this open in these coastal mountains, but here there had been a partial cut at some point in the past. 

The evenings were generally wonderfully clear, and I was able to enjoy a bit of star gazing; I witnessed two of the finest bolides I have ever seen, both with long trains, and one of them travelled about a third of visible sky before being lost behind the trees. Incidently , a bolide is an exceptionately bright and long lasting meteor.

An imprimatura of Venetian Red was again used, upon which the compositional block-in was drawn with a brush in Ultramarine mixed with M. Graham's Walnut Alkyd Medium. The pigments used were Yellow Ochre (W&N), and Rublev's Blue Ridge Yellow Ochre, which is brighter than the Winsor & Newton, Rublev's Italian Burnt Sienna, Venetian Red, Cerulean, Cobalt and Ultramarine Blues, and Cremnitz White. 

Things are getting interesting on the "poo" front. Less than half a mile from my campsite, on the road out, there was a large berry filled pile in the road, that was not there the day before; definitely bear scat this time, confirmed by a wandering bow-hunter who passed through my campsite. Although I was certain of its identity before we spoke, it was nice to have another opinion.

*(to loosely paraphrase Robert Duvall in Apocolypse Now).