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**Authentically Human! Not Written by AI**
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| One of Campobello Island's bogs. Can I paint this to my satisfaction? |
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Well, let's start with some sketching...
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...and move on to some color...
(5x8 gouache) |
For many years while living on Campobello Island, I focussed on the shore: rocks, water, islands, fishing boats, views both distant and close. After all, isn't this what one comes to an island for?
But Campobello has more than that—it has bogs. A bog sits away from the shore, often behind a barrier beach and its companion brackish pond. Sometimes, the bog occupies a spot that was once a kettle pond, a watery depression in the earth left behind by a chunk of melting glacial ice. Over time, bog plants take root. As time passes, decaying vegetation builds up and compresses into peat—a process that takes thousand of years.
In this deepening richness, many species enjoy a slow existence: dwarf versions of trees like black spruce and tamarack; sphagnum moss and reindeer moss (actually a lichen); plus baked apple berry, cotton grass, rhodora, leatherleaf and bog laurel. And because the bogs have carnivorous plants like sundew and pitcher plants, I'm sure there are some tiny animals living there, too, although I haven't seen them. There are birds a-plenty.
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| Bog laurel |
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| Tamarack |
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| Rhodora |
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| Leatherleaf in bloom |
This season, I'm finding myself turning away from the shore and inward to the bogs. (Perhaps mirroring the psychological turning inward that I seem to be undergoing this year.) As I saunter on the boardwalk that the more-accessible bogs have, I often linger to look. A visual artist, I am easily seduced by texture and color—both of which the bogs serve up in spades. The bog is a wild tapestry, tightly woven out of the thinnest of threads, and my eye wants to pick apart this dense fabric to enjoy every inch.
Seeing this beauty is one thing; painting it is another. My enjoyment of the seeing is so great that I'm afraid I will fail in the painting. At this point, I am engaging only in making quick gouache sketches for color notes and pencil studies of the dwarf trees. Will I go beyond this to something more ambitious? I'm not sure yet.
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| Two 5x8 gouache sketches for color notes |
