Sun Setting over Fox Cove.

C1276

“March Sunset from Fox Cove, #2”

(North Cornwall, England)

Watercolour, Gouache & Sepia Ink, with touches of Pastel

 on  90lb., Not, Turner's Blue-grey Watercolour Paper

from Ruscombe Mill

5” x 7”

Click here to make this your Own

[Note: “Not”, in the Media description above, means “cold pressed” ... that term is used in Britain, cold pressed over here.]

A mixed media work like this begins with a sharpened stick, a twig really, dipped in  sepia Acrylic Ink, and the cliffs and rocks were broadly blocked in. The acrylic ink was used as it is waterproof, once dry. Many times I use Walnut Ink, even though it is not waterproof, but not when the paper will be saturated with Watercolour washes. In that case I might outline the forms in pencil first, then lay in my Watercolour washes, and then work in the Walnut Ink over that, and then continue working with Watercolour and Gouache, with a not quite dry brush effect ... you might say a dry wash; the ink might bleed a little, but not a lot ... then true dry brushing to finish off. I have digressed from the description of this work where I used Acrylic Ink, straight off ... I probably began with a light pencil line to place the horizon. Once the ink was dry, Watercolour and Gouache were used for the painting. Much of the inkwork would have been supressed by the opacity of the Gouache, so some of it would be re-established with the stick and Ink again. Finally some judicious touches of Pastel were used in the sky.

Arriving back in Treyarnon Bay, Cornwall to sell my little flat, after my first four months in Oregon, this was my first sunset. We are standing at the head of the cove looking down the length of it. The view in the the last post, “Blustery Day at Fox Cove,” was from down the left side looking across the mouth of the cove to the promontory on the right. The spine of rock in mid-cove, in this little study, was out of view to the right in that larger Watercolour. You will see that it is #2, in the title above. Number one is in Helmsley, Yorkshire, with JackFineArt.com, and can be purchased there, framed. The above work is unframed. In the other one, the sun is just at the bottom of the bright orange strip of cloud above the horizon. In the image above, the sun has just slipped below the bright yellow edge of cloud below the orange strip, so that it is behind the light blue clouds just above the horizon. These light blue clouds have a number of openings allowing light to glow through, and the sun may briefly shine through one of these before it disappears below the horizon ... or it might not ... that is part of the enjoyment of a cloudy sunset ... will it show through, or won't it ... will there be good colour, or will it fade away as a grey bland evening. In this case the colours never got any better than this, and once the sun actually dipped below the horizon, that was pretty much it, but it was good for this little while.

*****

Bitterbrush leaves are on the turn. About the end of the first week of August, the first yellow leaves appeared. At first I thought they were late flowers until I took a closer look, and saw they were leaves; now about 10% of the leaves are yellow. There is another bush, related to tha gooseberry, that is even further into the yellow. Autumn is here already, even though the days are still getting into the high 80s, and low 90s.

The Seasons come and the Seasons go. The weathermen and the newscasters will tell you, for example, that the 21st of June, the Summer Solstice, is the first day of Summer. Shakespeare would disagree, and so would I ... it is Mid-Summer's Day, not the first day of Summer ... Mid-Summer ... the longest day of the year, and thus the shortest night ... A Mid-Summer Night's Dream. Summer begins six or seven weeks earlier. In Padstow Cornwall, Summer begins on the 1st of May, and is celebrated as such. I celebrated 23 Maydays in Padstow, and I sang the Mayday songs with them, and I fully agree with the them ... “them Padstonians is right, Bey!”. Thus Autumn begins in early August, and the Autumn Equinox in September, the 23rd I believe, when the night and the day are of equal length, is not the beginning of Autumn ... It is the middle of Autumn, as the leaves are telling me now. Of course the Seasons are not to be pinned down to a particular date; they vary with the climate and latitude, and even altitude, but for England, and Oregon, and even in the Upper Midwest, where I grew up, it generally works that way. Midwinter ... 21st of December ... the shortest day of the year ... snow lay heavy on the ground, when I was a boy living outside of Lake Nebagamon in northern Wisconsin ... not the first day of Winter ... Mid-Winter.

*****

Since last Saturday, the 22nd, there has been a smokey haze over the landscape from the wildfires around San Francisco 500 miles to the south. Friday night, the stars and the Milky Way had been glowing at their best, but when I awoke and looked across the flat, to the hills, a mile or two away, there was what looked to be a mist and a positive fogbank. The fogbank soon burned off with the sun, but the mist remained and as the day progressedprogressed got thicker. I couldn't smell smoke and I saw nothing to indicate it was close by. I'm not convinced that the fogbank wasn't just that, a fogbank ... it acted like one and there has not been one since; only this continuous smoke haze. Anyway, that first night I could see no orange glow in the sky in any direction, so I reckoned there was no fire close by. I was still not certain that it was smoke. I have no cell connection in camp, and my car radio died some time ago. The next day I went to town for supplies, I was able to get internet radio a few miles from camp, so I heard about the smoke from the wildfires around San Francisco. The fifth day of smoke, Wednesday, it was almost clear in the early morning,  but buy evening was the worst day yet; reminiscent of the Montana wlidfire smoke I experienced, when camped on Brooks Lake, north of Dubois, Wyoming, back in  ‘17. Last year was good in that I had no smokey days all Summer long, except for the second time, in ten days, that I passed through Crater Lake National Park; that smoke was from a wildfire way to the west near I-5, I believe. I wonder how long this smoke will last?

Poldark Country.

C1242

“Evening Light in Pendarves Cove”

(Bedruthan Steps, Cornwall, England)

A Watercolour

on Saunders Waterford, 140#,

cold pressed Watercolour Paper

4”  x  9-1/4”

Click here to make this your Own

I lived in Cornwall, England for 23 years ... Poldark country. Sadly I have only seen a couple of episodes of that story. The first series, back in the 70s, I had no television, and this latest series ... I have no television. But many of the scenes I have painted over the years, you might say most of them whilst living in Cornwall, were of Poldark country, since all of Cornwall is really Poldark country.

Four years ago, I stopped for the night in Moscow, Idaho, at an old friend from Cornwall's house. Tim (and his first wife), was my downstairs neighbor, when I lived at Treyarnon Bay. Not having arrived until after eight in the evening, after eleven hours of driving and crossing seven Oregon mountain ranges, we repaired straight to the kitchen, ate and drank and laughed for the next seven hours. The television in the sitting room had been on low, in that room, the whole time we were regalling each other with stories in the kitchen. When at 3:30 or so, we entered the sitting room and found it still on, we both stopped and stared at the screen, for it seemed familiar ... and it was, for we both realized we were looking at the end of show credits of a Poldark episode, scrolling down over a view of Bedruthan Steps, not a mile and a half from our former residence ... Surreal!

[Note: After that, I slept in a chair for a couple of hours, then hit the road, going over the Lolo Pass to Missoula, Montana,  and subsequently driving 634 miles, spending the next night at the first rest stop past the junction of the Little Bighorn with the Yellowstone River. I was headed for Minneapolis and then the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for a class reunion.]

For sixteen years, I had lived a mile and a half from Bedruthan Steps. The first several years I rarely got down there, as the bottom of the stairway down to the beach had washed away in a storm, and, subsequently, the National Trust had blocked off the top of the stairs for safety purposes. The only other way to the coves below, was from the north end of the beach at extreme low tide, and with the water's edge then so far out, it was not so interesting. Once the stairs had been repaired,  Bedruthan Steps became one of my favorite bits of coast to go to and to paint. For four months during the Winters, the top of the stairs were also blocked, but by this time I had discovered how to scramble over the blockade, and so have the place all to myself, rarely seeing anyone else who might also know how to get down there.

Pendarves Cove, in the painting above is the first cove you descend to, down the narrow stairway in a crack in the cliffs. That would be to the left off the painting. Another of my paintings with the shadows of early morning, from this viewpoint, was in the “Artist's and Illustrator’s Magazine,” back in the early 2000s ... Issue #19 rings a bell. On a Summer morning, with an ebbing tide, from this point you can scramble around into the next cove, Redcove, and if you watch the waves and are quick enough, you can get into it twenty minutes or so before any of the Summer visitors find their way into that cove. Then skirting around to the other side, there is a cave that you can scramble through, and be in the third cove (which name escapes me at present), and be there for an hour and a half, before any one else makes it around the headland ... few people were aware that the cave went all the way through, I discovered, and besides, it was a bit of a scramble as well. Bedruthan Steps became one of my favorite painting subjects, during my final years in Cornwall.

Incidentally, Bedruthan was a Cornish giant who fled across the coves here, using the sea stacks as stepping stones, when fleeing the devil one night ... at least according to local folklore; and who would dispute such a venerable source?!!

*****

More  campsite observations:

During the last half of June and the first ten days or so of July, whenever I walked up into the Ponderosas, there were big caterpillars marching along every few yards. These were not of the hairy kind. They were about four inches long and about half an inch thick, dark grey-green in colour with some brown and black in the design. They reminded me of the white ones I have found under the bark of some sort of dead pines, in the past, and which I roasted and added to a rice dish (I followed the directions found on a survival site). I did not try these, as I am yet unsure as to whether all un-hairy caterpillars are edible or not. Hopefully I will find information on these, at some point, as they could be a survival food source at some future time. Incidentally, the white ones depended on the condiments added to the meal for palatability; I understand that Witchity grubs, down in Australia, are flavourful in their own right.

A few days ago, the wind blew many little catkin-like objects out of the trees. They are about an inch to an inch and a half long, about a quarter inch wide, and rusty brown in colour. I think that these are what are called male pinecones. These, I believe, are the source of all the pollen, I talked about back in the first couple of weeks in June; the greenish-yellow smoke, that I thought was coming out of my car when driving out of La Pine on the 4th of June; the same colour dust that Kicked up on my trouser bottoms when walking through the woods; the same stuff settling on my car and any horizontal surface, for that matter; and the same stuff left as a scum ring around the puddles in the road after the rain ... that stuff. I have vague memories of reading and/or seeing documentaries about it. Since my connectivity is so sparse out in the various places I camp at, I cannot research this. So I will go with what I just said.

In the evenings, before pitch dark, I have noticed smallish butterfly-like moths working over the old blossoms on the bitterbrush. There are fewer bees working them in the daylight, as they seem to have lost interest in them since the flowers are so long past their prime. I wonder if these moths were working them all along?

The Spring, before I turned nine, was when I began to make discoveries in the woods where we lived in Northern Wisconsin. We lived three miles from the small village of Lake Nebagamon, and our nearest neighbors were a quarter mile away. Everyday, after school, I was out in the woods, and the fields and down at the extremely small and seasonal pond. Before that Spring, it was mostly play, and my observations were incidental. But that Spring, things began to have more meaning, I began to see more relationships, and had more understandings of my observations ... they also built upon the earlier “incidental” observations. It was a time of discovery ... with meaning. These days, out here, I am feeling that same sense of awe and discovery of my childhood.

As adults too many of us have lost that sense of discovery ... of wonder. I pity those poor fools who purport to love the great outdoors, but then come out here and treat it as a shooting gallery, and an ATV race track, and, too often, a trash can. The World would be a better place if these folk would get off their vehicles, lay down their arms for awhile, and stop to smell the roses during their time out here; perhaps then they might gain an actual respect for these Great Outdoors, and take their trash back home.

The Devil's Kettle

 Tuesday, June 6, 2017; Judge C. R. Magney State Park & Esther Lake.

Morning at Horseshoe Bay Campsite.

Awake and up at 05:40, some photo-recon along the shore both before and after breakfast.  Since I am where I am, just past Hoveland, I headed off to see the closest falls, at the Judge C. R. Magney State Park, which was six miles back down the road along Lake Superior towards Grand Marais.  This entails a walk of about a mile through the woods high above the Brule River (the Minnesota Brule, not the Wisconsin one), passing by the Upper Falls on the way.  It's quite a trek, because of the 175 stairs going down to the Upper Falls, which of course you have to climb back up on the return journey.  And of course once you have gone that far, you have to climb again to get to see the Devil's Kettle 700 feet beyond (Oregon does not have a monopoly on the Devil's property ... see, here is his kettle!). The Upper Falls is wonderful enough, but the Devil's Kettle is a special falls and in a class of its own.  The falls here splits into two parts; one over the edge like a normal cascade, and the other into a hole, with no seeming egress of the water ... thus the Devil's Kettle.  In these photos, it is hard to see the dual nature of this falls, because of the great amount of Springtime/early Summer run-off.; all the waterfalls are flowing more full than I have ever seen them.  Previously, I have only been here in the height of the Summer, or in the Autumn, when the flow is lower.  Under those conditions the Devil's Kettle is more readily apparent. 

The Trail to the Upper Falls & the Devil's Kettle. 

The Upper Falls on the Brule River.

The Devil's Kettle.

Once I had negotiated the 175 steps of the return journey, I took the side trail that leads along a hogback spur ridge to the Lower Falls.  This is a true primitive trail, very infrequently used.  Once there was a sign at the trail junction, informing people of the existence of the Lower Falls.  I always have saved this Falls for the return journey.  It is not a large falls compared to the previous two on this trek, but I always enjoy the solitude of it ... I have never met anyone on this trail or at the falls itself.  I was thinking of a sketchbook drawing of this falls, but the Sun was beating down, and it was getting late.  Most visitors are in a rush to get to the various falls, but it pays to take one's time on this walk through the woods, to enjoy and experience the Northwoods.  A lot presents itself, if one takes time to notice; various flowers whom I don`t know who they are, but others whom I do and are old friends; bits of the forest floor, and which I find especially fetching; odd stumps and fallen trees that I find interesting.  All these bits that make up the Northwoods ... the Northwoods of my childhood of Upper Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.  I drink this all in before I begin my trek West, and the very different forests out there.

The Top of the Devil's Kettle.

Upstream above the Devil's Kettle.

The Lower Falls.

This slow nostalgic stroll to the falls and back took longer than originally planned, so deciding that it was too late to visit Grand Portage today, I thought I might go back to the Lake Superior Horseshoe Bay campsite, and maybe do a drawing of the small islet, but sadly someone else had nabbed the site.  So I put my backup plan in motion and headed up the Arrowhead Trail and a small campground at Esther Lake.  There were said to be five sites there, but I found only three, and both the waterside sites were occupied.  This left me the bijou buggie site, but with a bit of repellent applied to exposed areas, and lighting a couple of mosquito sticks during supper preparations,  and that was sufficient to keep the pesky little buggers at bay.  After supper I strolled down to a point in the lake.  The Sun had just gone down and the evening breeze was sufficient to ripple the water enough to make sparkles on the water from the light of the waxing gibbous Moon ... another fine day Up North.

On the Forest walk to and from the various Falls on the Brule.

Water Violets.

I recognize this flower but can't recall what it s called ...
eventually I will find out and replace this caption, no doubt at some far future date.

Wild Strawberries.

Forest Floor.

Paper Birch Trunks.

Wild Violets.

In the Northern Forest.

Bunch Berries on the Forest Floor.

In the Northern Forest.

Evening on Esther Lake.

Waxing Gibbous Moon on Esther Lake.

Up North

Yep … been a bad blogger over the Autumn, Winter, and Spring, but I am gearing for more frequent, but irregular postings.  The irregularity will be down to whether I have an Internet connection at any particular time.  If my experience of the Lake Superior North Shore (see this and the next few blog posts), is an indication, irregular will be the operative word. I will also include intermittent posts about my Autumn in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and my time in England.  And so to the first of the posts from my recent trip Up North. 

Moon through Jack pine

And so after a Winter off in England, and the Upper Great Lakes, my silence is broken, as I head "Up North," as we say here in Minnesota ... State of my birth.  Heading “Up North,” usually means heading for the Northwoods, and for many, the Lake Superior shore and the Arrowhead region, so called for the shape of the northeast region of Minnesota north of Duluth.  My formative years were spent not far from here a few miles southeast of Duluth in Lake Nebagamon, Wisconsin, amongst the birch & pine & lakes thereabouts, and with the famous Brule River close by.  In the years I lived in England, when I came home to Minnesota, we would invariably head Up North at least once, if not more, during my visits.  I love it as you head up I-35, from the Twin Cities towards Duluth, and by the time you have gone but sixty or seventy miles on your way, the open farm fields with clumps of trees gives way to forest with the odd field cut out of them … the beginnings of the Northwoods … and when the first paper birches appear and you know you are approaching those familiar forests of your youth.  Once you crest the hill and the Twin Ports of Duluth, Minnesota and Superior, Wisconsin with beyond the shining blue waters of Kitchi-gami (Lake Superior), are arrayed below you, memories of long ago (and every visit since), flood the soul.  This is the land of Whitefish & Sturgeon; of Lake Trout, & Muskie, & Northern Pike, and Walleyes; of Whitetail Deer & Moose; of the Bear & the Wolf (incidentally, Minnesota never lost its Wolf population). 

And so it was that earlier today, I drove along the shores of Kitchi-gami, earlier today, and turning left on Hwy 1 to Finland, MN, and then onto County Road 7, and on into the forest for 25 miles, I came to the primitive campground at Harriet Lake after sundown, as the last fishermen were pulling out, and I took one of the five or six widely dispersed sites ... and am the only one in residence.  A beaver was paddling to its home below my camp, and the Loons (the Minnesota State bird) were calling, and the unofficial State bird (the mosquito), also came out to greet me, but my Permethrin impregnated clothing, and a bit of Deet, pretty much kept them at bay.  I ate a light supper and, as I was supping my after-dinner camp coffee, I watched the light-show of distant lightning, far to the west, even though the Moon & Stars shone through high cirrus cloud above.  I tried to capture the display on camera, but no success ... too far ... too dim ... but I did get a photo of sorts of the Moon, shining through the branches of a Jack Pine.  And so to bed at 2:05 AM, with the sound of night birds, and the Loons, and with the light-show still going on after three hours, and still no closer ... it never did arrive.