Back in the Studio

We are back in our studios. I'll make a couple finale posts in a day or so with some ideas and thoughts about the trip and the work it generated.

Great Art Quotes

No painting trip is complete without a notebook for thoughts and great reading. Here are some of my favorites.

" The greatest triumph of art comes at the moment when realizing to the fullest your grip over the medium, you deliberately sacrifice it in hope of discovering a vitual hidden truth within you." Henry Miller

(Speaking about the landscape).." where the tangible and the mythical become the same" Edward Abbey

" The artist should fear to become the slave to detail" Albert Pinkum Ryder

" I don't know what you do when you start but I clean my desk, I make a lot of stupid appointments that I make sound inportant. Avoidnace, delay, denial. I'm always scared that I'm not going to know what to do. Its a terrifying moment. And then when I start I'm always amazed" Oh that wasn't so bad". Frank Gehry

Day Seven

Is it day seven or day six? Things are starting to get nice when you begin to lose track. You melt into the moment, into the landscape. You start to dream about waves and bluffs. And the work finally begins to become impressions not depictions. A lot of the gouache work Melanie and I do is done outside but not really on location. Its more memory work for me.

Day Six

Sunrise..time to get to work.



Since having the luxury of time on North Manitou Island for ten days and being here for nearly a week, Richard and I have considered these painting trips like residencies. To be away from the other aspects of our business, the everydayness of phonecalls, mail, bills, errands, and random minutia...the mind is altered, changed, transformed. We watch the weather and read the skies not from the weather channel, but from the high bluffs just steps from our door, smell the winds change as the islands disappear, and stay awake for the northern lights. Paying attention constantly to light is a way of life for us, but in these elements and rhythms watching light and its many moods is wonderously enhanced.
Melanie Parke

Day Five

Another beautiful day. The hill in the background is called Alligator Hill. I spent the morning driving around in the van painting a couple oils...



And then in the afternoon our friend Cre joined us for some gouach work on the beach. Melanie worked more on some abstracts, what she considers to be like poems.

"So what am I thinking about when I’m out here in the wind and the sun and the fresh air? I assume that most painters would be explaining their painting process in terms that you read about all the time. Light, value, color hue, composition. Frankly, I’m not sure what any of those mean really. To me they are words for describing a painting after the fact and fall short of explaining what good painting is all about. Take the work of John Marin and Tom Thompson, two of the greatest landscape painters of the modern age. You could hardly say that their work follows the rules that are being taught in the countless plein air painting workshops around the country today. I rather think of good painting in terms of emotion, feeling, weight, poetry.
Walking the shore here the last couple days I see the lake as the base of everything around it. The lake has a weight. It is constantly seeking its own level and establishes the majority of the horizon in sight. The land, a continuing line of points, bays, inlets and long shores meet the lake. They reach to the shore like animals coming to drink.(No wonder the native people created so many animals legends of the area) And on top of everything is the vast sky,ever changing,a shifting,passing stew of clouds and color, never static ,never the same. This is what I’m seeing and thinking about. Certainly I have to use the physical qualities of the paint, the differing values of color and I have to think about fitting(composition) this paint onto a shape of canvas but I think its more important to think about how that big body of water could swallow me up in a blink of an eye."
Richard Kooyman

Day Three

I spent the morning painting while Melanie headed out to hike around. A wonderfully dramatic morning with lots of grey fog over the islands.



Heres my simple set up over looking Sleeping Bear Bay. We will talk a little more about whats going on in our heads in up coming posts.

Day Two

During the 1860's Glen Haven was a stopping point for steamer ships to reload wood supplies on their trips from Chicago to Buffalo, New York. The ships burned between 100-300 cords of wood per trip. Glen Haven became a popular refueling stop when the Manitou Islands ran out of wood. They had used it all up.
Light drizzle with thick over cast clouds most of the day. Began to unload some of our painting gear.



Shopped for some good Michigan reads at the best little bookstore in the north, The Cottage Bookshop in Glen Arbor.The Cottage BookShop



Melanie did manage to do some small abstracts in gouache based on her experience of the day, like little poems.

Day One

We arrived in Glen Haven on a beautifully warm day. We immediately hit the trail with our cameras, a great way to scout an area. Melanie and I have painted in this area many times and love its history and its natural beauty . It's really a special place. Glen Haven is at the end of a county road that ends at the tip of Sleeping Bear Point in the National Lakeshore.
This is a view of the point from the shore.



Below is a view from on top of the point.



And a view looking south along the Lake


You can learn more about the Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore by going to their website at Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore

You can view a map of Sleeping Bear Point here...Map

Glen Haven, Michigan

We are fortunate to be the guest at a great cottage in Glen Haven Michigan. Fall is one of our favorite times in Michigan and we both look forward to spending some time outdoors painting in one of our favorite spots in the world. Glen Haven is a historical town on the tip of the Sleeping Bear Point overlooking the Manitou Passage. A dock was first built here in 1865 and was a docking point for steamer and sailing ships of the Great Lakes. Its a great spot. One of those special natural wonders. This blog will focus on what its like to spend time painting in the area. Painting is discovery. Its reflecting knowledge and an act of interpretation. We will be posting pictures of the area and the work being done during our stay.