56.  Original Plein Air Watercolor Painting, "Plein Air, 6:15-7am, Sunrise Over Rebecca T. Ruark, Tilghman, MD, 7.15.24”, watercolor, 22 x 30”, 2024

Location: Tilghman, MD

Event: Plein Air Easton

Event Awards: Grand Prize, Quick Draw; Auto-invite for Plein Air Easton 2025

Having made three plein air paintings the previous day, of before the sunrise, a travel lift in Oxford, and the after-sunset view from dinner, my intent had been to sleep in, and leisurely wander over to paint a boat or two in the midday or afternoon. I woke up, naturally, at 4am. For a moment I laid there, considering sleeping in, working out… or just maybe catching the sunrise in a particular harbor I’d already investigated, where the “Rebecca T. Ruark” was moored, a beautful slipjack in Tilghman Island. I packed my watercolor stuff into my car, drove over in time to catch the violently red sun blazing away the blue darkness from the bow of the Ruark. There is no white in the painting - all white is the white of the paper, transparent watercolor only. The morning itself was glorious, as I was also receiving the health benefits of staring into the rising sun. Most of what is visible in this painting, all the light, all the major elements, was complete before 7am. I spent the next almost two hours setting up and painting in the details of the rigging and the foreground chains and shrouds and ties, wanting to get those just right, even using the edges of painting boards to make converging out-of-picture line attachment points. Why go to all the trouble? In Easton, there are boat people. They know this boat, in particular, like the face of an old friend. Get the rigging wrong and forever be nagged by the knowledge that to that particular audience - your piece will look… wrong. Maybe I didn’t get every detail right, but it was as accurate as I could be at the time. I ended up entering this piece as one of my two official competition pieces for Plein Air Easton.