October is a difficult month for me. I really don’t like the west coast winters. The grey days, unending rains and the ever present threat of heavy, wet snow just weigh on me as I anticipate the months to come. October is a wonderful month for me too though. Joy and I spend hours and days in the forest at this time of year picking mushrooms and wild mountain huckleberries. Our curling season starts in October and we both love that, and for me it’s an important month because that’s when I usually start painting again. Summers and all they bring just don’t allow me time to paint. That’s when I find my images and put them in my camera. October is when I start selecting and painting summer images. It’s therapy I suppose. In the rainy, dreary, grey days of fall and winter – I paint the summer.
It was a sunny day in the first week of October 2012. Alone, I went for hike up Soames Hill. I needed to get my heart rate up for my daily exercise routine and that demanding little climb serves that purpose. I’m always rewarded with the great views from the various lookouts at the top of the hill. And who knows, maybe I’ll find a painting up there.
Of course I had my camera with me. It’s a constant companion when I go into the forest or up a climb. One just never knows when the next painting will present itself. I looked patiently from the top of the hill and no image came to me. There’d be no painting found at the top of Soames Hill this day. It was on the way down the hill that the image presented itself.
My new camera has a feature that allows one to take a photograph that sees only one colour at a time. All the other colours come as black and white. As the photographer, you simply select the colour you want to key on. As I walked through the forest the red arbutus bark mulch on the forest floor caught my eye. I took the photograph and immediately I knew I had my next painting. It’s completely different than anything I’ve ever done before, and perhaps as close to abstract as I’ll ever paint. It had a mood though, a drama that caught my artist’s eye.
As people have seen the image I’ve painted they’ve put their own interpretation into it, even seeing snow in the forest. Maybe that’s a good thing, to allow the viewer to see what they may. That said, I thought it important that I write this story to go with the image. For those that want to read the story, you now know that the red in the painting is simply “The Arbutus Effect”
