"Otter Cliffs" 8x10 oilPleinair painting at Otter Cliffs is an experience of a life time. This little study shows Sand Beach and Mt. Champlain in the background where Hudson River School painters Thomas Cole and Fredrich Church painted in the 1840's. What is so wonderful is the location.
I try to get to this sight as the sun rises above the atlantic and lights the granite cliffs with an orange glow.
Lobster boats work their traps at my feet. I can see right into the cabin and watch them pull the traps up with the winch, toss the reject lobsters back into the ocean and the keepers into the lobster box.
The ocean is calm this time of year and the constant wash of the waves against the cliffs is soothing and mesmerizing. The occasional cruise ship comes in like an alien space ship and I am grateful as it rounds the bend out of sight but I think about the guys back at the stables and they busy day they and the horses will have hauling people around Day Mt.
Those thoughts change as a beautiful sail boat comes into view. I watch the cormorants dive for fish and study them as they dry their feathers in the sun. Evidently they can't allow their feathers to stay wet as they don't have the oils ducks have to keep them afloat. They do swim like ducks but have to return to the rocks to dry off. They look like prehistoric creatures with their bony wings and long petrodactyl like beaks pointed to the sky.
"Bernard Harbor" 8x10 oil
This is a quick sketch done while the sun was just setting. It took about 30 minutes while painting with fellow artist Hugh Grant that has a summer home here in Bernard Harbor. It is a real working lobsterman's town with many lobster boats filling the harbor as well as the reknown Thurston Lobster Pound that offers lobster right from the boats.
The maples are beginning to change color. I'm excited to have the opportunity to paint the fall colors.
