Ok, forgive the photography-I hope you will notice a great improvement once I actually shoot with a camera and not a phone but here is where I originally came up with the idea of a blog specifically about the vantage point of sitting close to the water. Everything is different, the scenery, the sky, the wildlife around you, you can slip into places and get by wildlife without them seeing you. It seems like your part of the scene and don’t interfere with it. The constant movement of the water and the sound of the birds around you is quite intoxicating-not that I suggest drinking and kayaking, in fact I’m going to say abstain but I digress.
I’m out with my son fishing on Lake Texoma, it’s one of those beautiful days where the air is cool and there is a slight breeze out of the south. Every time we go, we have these visions of grandeur, this time we are going to kill them, even if killing them means to just catch a lot of them and throw them back. It is a strange idea I guess as I’ve been told by a friend of mine to catch and just release, all that work, all that preparation for the fish and you catch them and just throw them back, well as far as I’m concerned If I want to eat fish, we have plenty at the grocery store, I would rather let them go and have another father be able to watch his son catch that big fish-you know the one I haven’t caught yet but still I have hope. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t eat some fish and that I haven’t eaten what I caught in the past but I don’t have a live well on the kayak so that would add to the idea of catch and release.
I love the feeling of being out here, even if the idea of getting up early in the morning and doing all the preparation has made me hesitant in the past to go fishing but I’m so glad to have a persistent son because this is what I need to do more. I’ve always said that if I had a mountain or a place to hike, I would be very active and love exercise, it’s just the idea of being in a gym and doing the same repetition of weights or riding on a stationary bike that just seems impossible for me to embrace. Here I am out in the middle of a pristine lake-okay they have zebra mussells-short of that pretty pristine, I am enjoying the workout almost as much as the fishing which seems to be a futile point lately.
The sky is an amazing blue and it reflects in the water perfectly, in fact as I look across the lake I am envisioning new paintings and options for the paintings I have started. The more I study the water and study how the reflection of the sky changes with the angle of the sun I learn more about painting water which is my specialty after all. So while everyone else is fishing, I am staring across the lake with a look like they must be thinking I’m spacing out. Every time I get out on the water I have a new idea and new vantage point to paint water. Again, as I’ve always said when we see things as an artist often we complicate them-when you study water I realize it is a simple process of a transparent block that refects the sky and when the mirror of the sky is broken you see either the bottom if it is clear enough or the darkness if it’s either to murky or too deep. I will definitely have more paintings of water and probably of texoma.
I’m planning on getting this same photograph from multiple lakes-I collect places, vantage points, memories and this will be the main focus of this blog. Anyway-until the next time-get out and explore…..