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Grateful That Our Family is Coping; Starting a Complex Watercolor of the Atlantic White Cedar Swamp

How’s it goin’? I hope you’re doing ok during this surreal time we’re all living in. Our family is good. We’re all extremely fortunate and able to work from home. My husband Steve just finished online classes and finals at Bucknell University. He was teaching 7 sessions per week and advising dozens of students using Zoom. Our new best skill for work and keeping in touch with those not so near but dear to us. Our daughter works in the casting industry in Los Angeles. Last week almost all creative production shut down, so her hours have been scaled back but health benefits are intact thank goodness. Our son and his wife are doing their very best to keep regular work hours and a routine with our 14 month old grandson, who just began walking, and a very patient dog, in a sunny California apartment. Silver lining: they are experiencing up-to-the-minute joy in every great new thing that babies do at his age. For us, it’s all happening 3,000 miles away. So I suppose we’re having the same experience as those whose grandchildren live a block away but need to stay socially isolated now anyway. I heart FaceTime. 

“Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally. But in some of nature's forests, the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and making life a hard struggle.” – John Muir*

Painting the Atlantic White Cedar Swamp, Cape Cod National Seashore, South Wellfleet, MA

In this entry I won’t go into a dissertation about the history and climatic changes going on in the Atlantic White Cedar Swamp – as magical as it is and was for me to spend an afternoon there last September 13, 2019. I’ll save that narrative for the next entry once I complete the finished painting. Instead, I thought it would be more fun to bring you into my studio process. Particularly when I tackle something as complicated as this intimate landscape. Several years back I did a painting titled, “Spring Thaw”, (aka “The Vernal Cape”) as part of an awareness project for the Barnstable Land Trust, Hyannis, MA. It was a watercolor of another Atlantic White Cedar swamp at Eagle Pond in the village of Cotuit on Cape Cod where I lived at the time. This is quite reminiscent of that watercolor and was just as complicated, mysterious and kind of spooky with a prehistoric vibe. (Kind of like a virus). These places are truly ancient. You can feel and smell the cool, quiet layers of earth when you’re standing in it. 

Shown here is a digital conversion, using the Noir filter on my MacBook Pro, of a little 5 x 7 inch watercolor sketch study. It will serve as a value study for the seventh painting in a series of eight that I’m about to start working on this week in my home studio. It’s great to have this useful tool that we all have access to on our smart phones!

I started the process by drawing a small graphite sketch based on a few reference photos. Paying attention to the feeling I wanted to convey and how composition, placement of darks and lights, repetition of vertical elements (trees) and how they play off the horizontal swath of darkness that separates the base of the forest from the reflections in the water. The diagonal interplay of branch work and fallen trees are arranged to draw the eye around and keep the viewer encased in the mysterious tangle of life. Color mixtures get worked out in the watercolor sketch. The palette is quite limited really. I use no black and no white paint. Whites are either masked with masking fluid in advance or usually painted around. In this case darks are a mixture of ultramarine blue and/or cobalt blue and burnt umber and/or burnt sienna. I saw a lot of pinks in the tree trunks and purples in the water so I introduced some rose madder. Greens are always a challenge. I’m using Bismuth Yellow in combination with blues to get shades of bright, almost neon green for mossy areas in full sunlight. If I can be mindful and exaggerate the pigments it will be a dynamic study and a more captivating painting.

What I figured out almost immediately from this exercise was just how important it will be to preserve “the sparkle”. Those lively little white bits dancing of leaves in deep in the forest, the bigger white ones reflected off the chartreuse moss and the pastel-colored geometric bits reflecting the sky in the water. Tannins in the clear swamp water are responsible for a bright orange glow bouncing off of layers of leaves and muck just below the surface. It’s important to note that if you put a pop of color (like bright orange) into your painting, be sure to find ways to subtly introduce it somewhere else where it will look natural or compliment what you’ve already done. It creates a more harmonious impression so that the human eye doesn’t fixate on one spot and therefore, their experience will be  minimized.

Ok, on to the finished painting. I’ll try to remember to take photos of steps along the way that will help you to see how I approached different stages. I think it will also help me to break it down into more easily digestible parts. There’s a food analogy! Meal planning creeps into my thoughts more frequently than ever during this time of self-quarantine.

Thank you for taking time to pop in and have a read. 

Be smart – be safe – be kind. 

As always,

Sandy

 * John Muir, also known as “John of the Mountains” and “Father of the National Parks”, was an influential Scottish-American naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, glaciologist, and early advocate for the preservation of wilderness in the United States of America. (Wikipedia)