I just returned from a couple nights on an island with a friend. No power, no roads, raw beauty. We canoed across a gut to get there and returned on foot across the same gut at low tide.
In my backpack was one night's dinner, my paints, brushes and two tiny panels. I rarely paint small but, in a way, it caused me to be more intimate --with my thoughts and my subject and the painting became very soothing, like the rise and fall of the tide. Like all time on islands, it was too short, but then if it was longer, would I have brought so little, focused so intently and contentedly?
NOVEMBER ISLAND
can you hear the water
as it rolls ashore
laps up and over the stones
and recedes
only to return
moments later
and the gulls
as they glide
over the treetops
moving back and forth,
tired from reaching for the sun
in their crowded turf
they sway
and creak
their voices, the gull's cries
compete with the wind
following the fisherman's boats
returning with their day's haul
and the gray sky turns to black
the hum of their engines dissolves
into
the quiet
of soft spruce crackling in the cookstove,
of flames burning in lamps
Lhadlock
2013©
In my backpack was one night's dinner, my paints, brushes and two tiny panels. I rarely paint small but, in a way, it caused me to be more intimate --with my thoughts and my subject and the painting became very soothing, like the rise and fall of the tide. Like all time on islands, it was too short, but then if it was longer, would I have brought so little, focused so intently and contentedly?
NOVEMBER ISLAND
can you hear the water
as it rolls ashore
laps up and over the stones
and recedes
only to return
moments later
and the gulls
as they glide
over the treetops
moving back and forth,
tired from reaching for the sun
in their crowded turf
they sway
and creak
their voices, the gull's cries
compete with the wind
following the fisherman's boats
returning with their day's haul
and the gray sky turns to black
the hum of their engines dissolves
into
the quiet
of soft spruce crackling in the cookstove,
of flames burning in lamps
Lhadlock
2013©
NOVEMBER ISLAND 1 & 2 5"X5" 125./EA
