…I lived on an island you could only get to via boat. There was little better than having my morning coffee on my dock, waving to passing yachts, feeling well above my true tax bracket. But all good things come to an end, and when I knew my time living on Goat Island was coming to a close, I set out to document my favorite place there, Grey Bay. She is well suited to her namesake color, for Grey Bay is ever changing with tides and light, and I wanted to capture it all.
I set up a ladder so that I could get a better perspective to look back into the marsh perched 15’ in the air. This also served as a tripod, and a system of nestled buckets as a tripod head. Without getting into to much detail, the buckets reduced parallax errors (close one eye, hold up a finger at arms length, then slowly move your head from side to side; the moving finger is a parallax error) and allowed me to shoot a controlled series of photographs across the landscape. I would shoot one set of the sky, then another at a different exposure for the ground. Back in the studio, I stitched them together with the aide of Photoshop for one continuous image.
I loved this spot, and would go out to capture the golden hour, through dusk, and into the dark of night at times. Sometimes if I realized that there was nothing worth photographing that day I would just stand on the top of my ladder, watching the colors change as the light bled from the sky. It was all for a series of four paintings that depicted Grey Bay from low tide in late afternoon to a full moon flood tide at night. But there was one image which caught me, but did not fit as a painting.
The reason I could never see myself painting this photograph was that it is a cloud that couldn’t possibly exist. In fact, it only did for only a minute or two before being pulled apart by the wind. It is something that existed better as a photograph, in all its glorious detail. But then RL•S invited me to be a part of a group show inspired by the theme of clouds. I’ve painted hundreds of clouds. I once spent an entire semester in college in the late nineties just painting clouds. I realized they were a weak spot in my landscapes, and what I needed was practice to emulate the Dutch landscape painters around the turn of the 19th century. Mine were nowhere near as good, but it was a start for what has become decades of practice.
So I combed my archives of photographs, went out and shot clouds for the sole purpose of this show, and yet still kept coming back to the reflected cloud image. I played with different crops, different shape of paintings, and what I realized is that without the landscape, without the thing that gives this cloud scale, and maybe admittedly without the headache of painting its reflection between the spires of grass, I slowly came around to the idea of it as a paining. (To be continued…)