Week 74

This is one of my favorite places. It’s my sweet Aunt and Uncle’s hideaway. We usually go twice a year to this place with no address. We can get 95% of the way by using our navigation system and the last 5% is done by intuition and a small prayer that we are pulling into the right secluded driveway.

It’s scary and beautiful to trust your heart, but your heart knows more than your head really. I love those moments when I give into the instinct, it’s a thrilling primal feeling of freedom and self sufficiency.

In painting this large landscape, I felt that instinct take over. It is similar in technique to the Water Forest and the French Lady. The wild trunks and branches were created using palette knife and a process called Sgraffito. Scraping the excess paint reveals several layers of color and create the illusion of endless trees. The colors show the damp, earthy feel of this place in winter, where life has not ceased or even hibernated. It is flourishing with lichen on the trees or the electric green moss lining the heavy exposed rocks. A myriad of colors in a tangle of trees leads us down the pebbled path to the cove. Here is where our intuition kicks in. It’s a mysterious but wonderfully familiar getaway in the swampy unknown.

“Path to the Cove”

48 x 24 | Oil on Hardboard