IRONWOOD AND SUNRISE

Ironwood and Sunrise, 12 x 16

After multiple calm mornings, I set up with a larger canvas, only to face strong gusts of wind halfway into the painting.  I've experienced these conditions before, and it's pretty easy for a canvas to become a kite.  So I pack up the painting and take it back to the room to finish.  I spend a good half-hour lifting bits of sand off the paint before painting the trees.
   Then the housekeeping staff come to clean the room.  I put the newly finished painting on a shelf in the closet, where nothing can fall on it, and come back after they finish to find that they have put a pillow on top of my painting.
   So this is a slightly blotted version of the original expression.  I hope you find it makes it soft and mysterious.

GIANT FIGS

Kapa'a Sunrise Palms, 6 x 8

At the Allerton Garden, our tour guide shows us a group of giant fig trees, with huge buttress roots.  You may have seen them in the movie, JURASSIC PARK.  Life finds a way.  He tells us that the plants were imported from Australia for the garden.  Australians who look at them now don't even recognize this form as belonging to the same plant.  Here in Hawaii, where they are exposed to so much rain, their growth pattern is altered beyond recognition.

How many of the choices we make are conditioned by our surroundings?

WRASSES

Captain Cook Pines at Sunrise, 6 x 8

We snorkel today at Poipu.  Finally, some fishes!  All of the spots we've snorkelled have been overfished, and the remaining residents are so skittish you can hardly see them.
  The little bay at Poipu is mostly rubble, with very little coral in an area protected by rock walls.  Rubble means lots of wrasses.  Yellow-tailed Coris are my favorite beauties, both adult and juvenile.  We find lots of rock movers.  I watch one twelve-inch fish move a ten to fifteen pound rock with its mouth, then catch a crab that was living underneath.  The crab is a difficult bite to get down.  The fish has to turn it in his mouth until it is claws outward.  I guess that's what you get for swallowing your food whole.

COASTAL TREES

Kapa'a Beach Sunrise, 9 x 12

Hiking along the beach trail in Kapa'a, I am captivated by the shapes of bushes and trees along the shore.  Three main types: a tall tree with waxy, rhododendron-like leaves; beach naupaka, with its juicy leaves in rosettes and white half-blossoms; and the ironwood, with its sturdy twisting trunks, and needles reminiscent of horsetail rushes.  All of them are pushed and pulled by sea and wind into giant bonsai creations, with little windows of sky and ocean between the branch clusters.  A shape-painter's gallery.

BY THE SEA, AT LANE GALLERY

You are invited to my show at Lane Gallery in Portland, info below.  The shark painting on the postcard is one of my pieces inspired by a visit to the Oregon Coast Aquarium.

PAINTING FRIENDS

Kapa'a Sunrise Rose, 9 x 12

This morning, just as I am finishing my sunrise painting, I turn around to see a crowd of onlookers: pigeons. Many of the pigeons are pecking hopefully at the ground, but the rest have an eye turned on me.  I've been sitting here for so long, I must have some food for them.

Down on the beach in the soft sand, some movement catches my eye.  It is a shore crab, running for his half-inch burrow in the sand.  Once I see one, I see twenty, scuttling in and out of bits of driftwood, picking with their claws for food.

Suddenly I'm hungry too.  Back to my room for breakfast.

KAUAI SUNRISE

Kapa'a Sunrise Cumulus

The roosters began announcing the dawn at 4 AM.  I know this because I set my alarm for 5 to give me time to walk down to the beach and set up for the 5:50 sunrise.  The roosters beat me to it.  On Maui, I always had to sit in the sand to paint sunrise.   Here there is space under some ironwood trees, with scrubby, broad-bladed grass to keep the sand from leaping into my paint box.  (I have not yet acquired my obligatory three-dollar grass mat.) Some intrepid grains of sand still manage to make the leap into my paints (two feet, I make it), and a few even get onto the painting, which is a full three-foot leap.  How do they do it?  Maybe I should give up and stand.  Except that sitting by the beach to paint sunrise is tradition.  It's part of the peaceful experience.  I will sit, and risk the sand.