Original Watercolor Painting, “Plein Air 4-5pm Lakeside Crew at Kenmore Log Boom Park”, watercolor, gansai watercolor, white gouache, 22 x 30”, 2023

This piece is one that came about almost by accident.  I was in Kenmore, on assignment for Lakeside Magazine, the alumni magazine of my high school alma mater, Lakeside School.  The assignment was to create some original artwork depicting the school’s rowing team, Lakeside Crew.  I had already been out in the coaching motorboat, following practice and sketching watercolor in my all-media sketchbook.  While those had been fruitful initial works, I struggled to draw on them and on the photos I’d took on the day to create the large-scale more filled-out paintings I had in mind.  I don’t really work from photos anymore - I don’t know why for this project I believed that was my only option!  So off I went, many times, to visit Kenmore’s Log Boom Park, which includes a long wooden dock with great views of the northern end of Lake Washington, the body of water where my old high school rowing team practices in the spring.  Sure enough, on the day this painting was made, it was clear, a few clouds, bright and windy, and as I worked on the landscape a rowing shell and a coaching launch appeared directly in front of me and stopped long enough for me to include them in the piece.  Also - I recall making the foreground water of this painting too dark, and almost giving up on it… but reached instead for my gansai watercolors, a slightly different media than the transparent watercolors I usually use - which can only go darker.  The gansai, on the other hand, can become opaque with the right small amount of water - so I was able to lighten up the foreground water, and save the piece.  I added additional embellishments of white gouache for the glare of the sun on the water in the studio later on - from memory.