Painting "Squal in the East"

This is a canvas on which I’d begun painting a still life of sunflowers. The flowers died after the first brief session, but this canvas was too good to waste so I turned it upside down to avoid thinking about what the colors represented.

I placed the horizon above the light patch in the underpainting. I wasn’t aware of doing this at the time, but it turned out to be serendipitous. After roughing in the sky and water, what's left of the old painting is temporarily standing in for the beach. Then with a big brush, I roughed in some of the foreground and the left of the painting and roughly delineated trees on the distant cliff. Now the canvas is mostly covered, though crudely. A few patches of the original painting are still showing.

I made a first try at defining the freshwater outflow, and began to indicate the reflections of the near cliff. I’ve left patches of the original gold on the near cliff.

I’ve given more attention to the farthest cliff, painted a dark line of the ocean in the distance and some waves coming in nearby, finally getting rid of the rubber ducky on the underpainting.

I repeatedly paint the wedge of ocean and waves as they come to shore, and try to more accurately depict the distant trees on top of the cliffs. I've painted negative shapes around those trees, giving them a bit of shape. This process will continue back and forth, positive to negative, until I'm satisfied. Acrylic paint allows me to do this and the process lets me leave out drawing entirely.

I start to deal with the foreground, letting the brush do a kind of thoughtless kelp calligraphy. It's a flat-footed approach, an initial attempt to show movement of the kelp in the freshwater outflow. More mud in the foreground — continuing to re-see the sand and muddy flowing water. I made a few more adjustments in the foreground and a couple of changes in the wet sand. There is now a barrier to the freshwater outflow.

I'm establishing more planes and values in the distant cliff: as the painting progressed I repainted all parts of the cliff over and over. Since I laid out the scene with no viewfinder, every time I looked at that long cliff I had to decide exactly where I was looking and what I wanted to include.

Now the first hints of a storm in the distance. I started darkening the sky and changing the color of the distant ocean.

One of the marvelous things about not planning is that I never know what nature has in store. When I began, the day was fairly overcast. Little by little the sky cleared and the sun shone brightly where I stood while a squall formed in the east darkening the distant sky.

I turned my attention to the cliffs, adding a big patch of grayish mauve; I placed it to form a connection to the edge of the sand against the water. Later, I modified that patch by inserting openings to the sandstone. As the sun lowered behind me, it warmed and brightened the cliffs. I finally paid some attention to the distant cliffs with much still to do.

Getting tired, I scumbled color over a large part of the nearest cliff without carefully looking. I was satisfied with the sky, the ocean, and the roughly painted yet suggestive freshwater in the foreground.

After looking at the painting for a couple of weeks, I finished more carefully establishing shapes of trees and vegetation on the cliffs. I’m afraid I obscured some of the warmth and strength in the near cliff and top of the sand and may try to repaint and simplify those areas without going too far.

— Marcia Burtt

All photos by Bill Dewey