Original Watercolor Painting, “Plein Air, 8-9am, Lake Union from Westlake, 3.27.23”, watercolor, 22 x 30”, 2023

This painting was the first I made of this view, looking east towards Lake Union and Capitol Hill from Westlake Avenue.  Since, I’ve painted this same view many times in many different conditions, but this first piece remains one of my favorite.  Occasionally (especially in the spring and summer) the morning light on Lake Union is augmented by just a touch of moisture in the air, and the glare becomes almost overwhelming.  This was one such morning.  The far shore of Capitol Hill, the Eastlake neighborhood where I grew up, was a mix of a warm and cool tone, to create the blue-gray.   I paid extra attention to the condition of the light around the glare on the water, and what it did optically to the horizon line around it.  This was one of the first times I really paid attention to the violet-red tones that emerge as the glare interacts with the human eye to create a warm glow, a lens flare around the edges of the white of the paper that is the glare.  There are two clouds in the sky, backlit, both brighter and darker than the color of the sky behind them.  Because of their shape some viewers have confused them for raising smoke.  At left is a barely rendered crane, erecting a new structure.  I tried in this painting to observe the reflections of the sky and the yachts at right as best as I could, and feel that that aspect of this painting was likely the most successful.  In the foreground glare (the white of the paper), the direction of the waves is diagonal upper right to lower left, while in the actual pattern of the waves and their dark reflections beyond the glare, the tilt is upper left to lower right.  This discrepancy is part of the process sometimes of observing a scene in time (in this case, an hour), as the wave direction changed from my painting the outline of the glare to the darker wave reflections.  Our brains will forgive minor discrepancies like this one if the colors are optical and put generally and specifically in the right places.  If I wanted to work from photos, I could, but working like this, en plein air, I welcome such changes into the piece.