Mid-Winter Afternoon at Sandymouth, Cornwall

C1283

“A Fine Winter’s Day at Sandymouth”

(North Cornwall, England)

 

Watercolour on 140-lb., Not,

Saunders Waterford Watercolour Paper

9” x 22-1/2”

 

Available ... email me.

Sandymouth? Where is Sandymouth?” I wondered, as I looked at a small painting in an exhibition. I had been in Cornwall for 15 or 16 years and hadn't heard of it, much less been there. I finally found it on my Ordnance Survey Maps and the mystery was solved ... it was found at the join of two maps, and so I had overlooked it all those years. It was just a few miles north of Bude. Eventually I made it down there, and quickly decided that the off-season was the best time to go, like most places in Cornwall. Not because of crowds, in this case, but because of having to pay to park in a private field; something as a Cornish resident I felt shouldn't apply.

 

The tides on the Cornish coast are large, even at neap tide, compared to Oregon ... I don't know why that is. Beaches, however, vary in how the tide acts. As an example, Sandymouth is what I call a “fast tide beach”. As you can see in the Watercolour above, the shore is covered with rocks and pebbles, and intersected with volcanic dikes, from the cliff bottoms on the right out to the level sands on the left. At high tide most of this is covered, and it takes awhile for the sea to drop far enough to expose the sands. At low tide on a spring tide the sea recedes much farther out than seen here and you can walk a long ways on the level sands. Every so often a larger wave will break and will come farther in on the sands than you might expect. But the exposed sand doesn't last long, and soon the tide turns and relatively swiftly the sands are inundated by the sea. Even on a spring tide you have maybe an hour to hour and a half. Thus I have coined the term “fast tide beach” for such. Tregardock Beach, south of Trebarwith Strand and Tintagel, is just such a beach. It's not that the tides are any shorter in time between low and high, but that the sands are so level that when the sea recedes, a great distance is exposed, and when the tide comes back in it seems that it comes in faster because so much ground is being covered.

 

In the above Watercolour, it could be we are at low tide on a neap tide. But if it's a spring tide then the sea would either have a long ways to go farther out, or be on its way back in. Without referring to old tide tables, I couldn't say which. During the course of the year, the sands also shift so that in this painting more of the sand is in amongst the rock, making it easier to reach the level sands to the left. Sometimes it's a real pain clamboring over the rocks to get there. I did another painting from the other side of the sea stacks, seen here, looking south on a low spring tide which shows the extent of the sands. That painting won the St. Cuthberts Mill Award for the best work on paper in the 1999 exhibition of the Royal Society of Marine Artists, in England.

 

 

*****

 

A Rufous-sided Towhee came into camp, and pecked around for a bit. It's a bird I am quite fond of, with its red breast and black head with garnet eyes; a secretive bird given to rummaging around in the undergrowth. I didn't expect to see one out here on the edge of the Ponderosas.

 

*****

 

While still smokey, it has thinned out the last couple of days, as the wind has been coming from the southwest, and the fires in that direction are further away. Only an easterly breeze would really clear the air, however.

Bodmin Moor Snow

C1172

“Bodmin Moor ... Snow”

(Cornwall, England)

Drawing in Sepia & Black Chalk heightened with White

on 90-lb., Not, Turners Blue-grey Watercolour Paper

from Ruscombe Mill

6” x 9-1/4”

Click here to make this your Own

Still in Poldark Country, as we have been since the end of July, and with this work we are now on Bodmin Moor. This is also Jamaica Inn territory, which has been made into a film a number of times, my favorite being the one with Jane Seymour. Here we are looking north from the Logan Stone on Loudon Hill to the southern prow of Roughtor (pronounced Row, as in argument, -tore), the Second highest of the two Cornish mountains, the other being Brown Willey, out of view to the right (a mountain in England is a hill over a thousand feet). A logan stone is a balanced rock like that in the foreground; usually, if you can get on the thing, you can rock it with your weight alone. Between here and Roughtor, which is about a mile or so away, are to be found many bronze age hut circles, and remains of small field walls, like those to be found on Dartmoor to the east.

Thinking of Claude Lorrain again not only of his Liber Veritatis, but of the whole of his work, I give the following quote from CLAUDE LORRAIN: PAINTER AND ETCHER by George Grahame, writing at the end of the 19th century (this biography of Claude is found in the Delphi Classics series volumes on Artists):

“The eye gradually accustomed to the Claudian world, bewitched by its sunlight and its atmosphere, begins to dwell with pleasure on the ruins and the marble palaces, the wooded hillsides crowned with convenient towers, the meanderings of impossible rivers. You have but to surrender yourself to the charm of this unreal world to lose sight of its unreality and live in it as one lives in a dream. The artist gives us the “great key, To golden palaces, strange minstrelsy, Fountains grotesque, new trees, bespangled caves, Echoing grottos, full of tumbling waves And moonlight; ay, to all the mazy world Of silvery enchantment!” We are carried far away from this workaday world of ours into an ethereal domain whence all toil, distress, and terror have purposely been banished by the painter. The inhabitants of this ideal world are as gods. Its skies are all but cloudless. All the rough places in it are made smooth. Such is the Claudian landscape, the quintessence of reality distilled in the alembic of a poet’s soul. Surely only the sternest moralist will condemn its charm. When at last you close the book and turn from this world of Claude’s to nature, you feel for a moment like a man who steps from a concert-room, where he has been listening to the music of Beethoven and Mozart, into the din and glare of the street.”

Looking through the Liber Veritatis or a series of his paintings, we are entering a world that never was ... but I for one would like it to have been. Consider strolling about in a pastoral & mythical Arcadia á la Claude, happening upon, nymphs & dryads, the odd satyr, joining in with a dance of villagers and mythical demi-gods, hoisting a flagon of wine, or three, with Bacchus and his merry retinue, having a chat with the local river god on a golden afternoon, as he lugubriously takes his ease beside his cooling stream on a golden glowing afternoon. My preferred mythology, of course, is the dark and wild mythologies of my Norse forebears, and the Ring Cycle, but there is something to be said for taking a break, now and then, from Brynhilda's Hel-ride, the slaying of Grendel, or raiding the tomb of Angantyr the Berserker for the cursed sword Tyrfing, and repairing to the sunnier climes of the Arcadian southlands to kick back for awhile.

*****

Nature story ... A Golden Mantled Ground Squirrel was nibbling on a strawberry remnant, when a chipmunk came up behind him and nipped the base of his tail, and ran off, chased by the ground squirrel; the ploy didn't work, however, as the ground squirrel got back to the strawberry first. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”, as a little known Bard once said.

Dinosaur National Monument to Mesa Verde … No Autumn Aspens in Colorado!

(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 blog posting at the top of the post, and not the title of the painting itself; this will open up the actual blog itself, and you may then enjoy the paintings at their best.)

Wednesday, October 18^th_Friday, the 20th, 2017; Dinosaur National Monument to Mesa Verde.

Here is another painting I did last Winter in England.

C1621

“The Calm before the Storm …Gulls Rising over Kingsgate Bay”

(Isle of Thanet, Kent, England)

Oil on Centurian Oil Primed Linen Canvas

5” x 7”

Click here to make this your Own

On through Dinosaur, turning south through Rangely, both of whose lights I had been seeing of an evening for the past four nights, and on through Grand Junction, to Hwy 141 and Unaweep Canyon a few miles beyond.  Well, not exactly quickly through Grand Junction, for I had ascertained before leaving my clifftop camp above Dinosaur that if I got to Grand Junction by 13:30, I could catch a showing of “Bladerunner 2049.”  And so I did.  It is not as revolutionary a Sci-Fi film as the first one all those years ago, but it creditably continues our look at the Bladerunner universe.  I will say this that it is a long film, but I sat through the whole thing without a fidget, and was surprised at the time when I looked at my watch as the credits rolled (I did not  know its length when I sat down).  The first film is still one of the few true Sci-Fi films that there are, ‘Alien’ and ‘The Terminator’ being another two.  Horror and Fantasy get lumped in with the genre, but they shouldn’t be; they are their own entities.

Hwy 141 on the way down the Divide Road
from the Uncompahgre Plateau.

At Seep Springs in Unaweep Canyon.

At Gateway and the end of Unaweep Canyon,
and on into the Delores River Canyon.

After the film and a bit of resupplying, it was getting on towards sundown by the time I got twenty some miles into Unaweep Canyon, so I took the next forest road on the left (Divide Road), and as I did so I saw a truck on a ledge high above me … good grief, I thought, I’ve got to go way up there!  It was not a difficult drive, as it turned out, but a bit wash-boardie here and there, and the views from the ledge were spectacular … when I could take my eyes off the road to take a look.  And there was an inordinate amount of traffic coming down off the Uncompahgre Plateau.  Twenty eight vehicles passed me going down by the time I got into the National Forest and a campsite amongst the Ponderosas.  Normally I would have encountered two or three, or even none.  Upon nearing my eventual campsite, I spotted a sign in the dusk, informing all that there was a controlled burn in progress.  After I settled into camp, more vehicles passed by on the road, most heading out, and a very few heading in.  There was a bit of smoke in the air, but since most of the vehicles were leaving, I figured the controlled burn must have burned down.

In the Delores River Canyon.

Beastie.

The next day it took me six hours to make the hundred or so miles through Unaweep Canyon, and along the Delores River Canyon beyond the community of Gateway, as the photo-ops seemed to present themselves every few yards; red canyon walls contrasted with the green of the Junipers & Sage!  I hope I got some good shots as it was a mostly overcast day, although with some sunbreaks.  Once past Norwood, I thought I would find an early campsite, but I ended up on this interminable gravel road, with small ranches wall to wall and no public land for 17 miles, dropping down into and climbing out of two deep canyons along the way, before I found a campsite inside the National Forest on the northern slopes of Lone Cone, the westernmost mountain of the Colorado Rockies.  I was in a forest of dead Aspens, or so it seemed, since there was not one golden autumn leaf on any tree that I could see.  The Aspens had been in their prime when I left Grand Teton National Park, several degrees of latitude north, but down here in southern Colorado they had already turned and been blown off!  In 2013, at almost exactly this same time of the year, the Aspens had been in their prime, when I passed through not so far from where I now was.  At least the Cottonwoods had been stunning during this days drive … so to hell with the Colorado Aspens.

North Slope of Lone Cone Mountain …
no Autumn Aspens in Colorado …
I left them all in Wyoming this year.

Main Street Telluride.

Telluride is up at …

… the head of this valley.

The next day I refused to retrace my route along that gravel road, but took a different one north to the Highway, east of Norwood.  Here I did overlap the previous afternoon’s route, for 5 miles or so, but I was on blacktop.  I breakfasted in the campground I should have stopped at, but I had assumed it would have a charge, but I discovered too late that it did not.  Chalk it up for future reference.  I arrived in Telluride about 11:30, just to see the town, not knowing anything about it.  It has a really beautiful setting near the head of a canyon, with stunning peaks all around.  The town itself seems really laid back, almost hippie-esque, much more accessible than Aspen appeared to be.  I asked about how the snow compared to Aspen or Vail, and was told there was little difference, but that the ski runs were much steeper.  Another native said that it appealed to 20 year ski bums who liked to point their skis downhill and hang on for dear life.  I think if I had been able to afford to take up skiing when young Telluride would have appealed to me, but I went to England and an art career instead.  Telluride, so I have been told was the site of Butch Cassidy’s first bank robbery … that boy got around … I’ve been running into him all over since I headed up for the Eclipse.

Sheep Mountain on Hwy 145.

Yellow Mountain is across Hope Lake from Sheep Mountain.

Yellow Mountain from the top of the pass.

The Lizard Head.

Hwy 145 from Telluride to Cortez and Mesa Verde is one of the great mountain drives, and if you have ever drunk a can of Coors, you will recognize one of the views.  And here at Mesa Verde National Park I finally have been able to dispense with my long-johns for the first time since September 15^th!  It is chill at night, and there has been a vicious wind building up during the days, but it is warmer than northern Wyoming.

Imprimatura: Rublev Italian Burnt Sienna;

Drawing: W&N Cobalt Blue;

Painting: W&N Cobalt & Cerulean Blues, Venetian Red; Rublev Blue Ridge Yellow Ochre, Italian Burnt Sienna, Lead Whites #1 & #2.