My Painting: "Tomorrow's Promise"

All the Door County Festival artists were required to paint
sunset on Wednesday night at Anderson Dock in Ephraim.

8" x 10" Oil on RayMar Panel
Copyright 2009

Here is the painting I did from the very end of the dock. On my walk to the end of the pier, I passed many artists, already working away. I felt I was late getting there, but it was only 6:00 PM. Sun wouldn't set for another two and a half hours!

For my painting, I decided to focus on the sky, not the marina or boats. It had been quite some time since I'd painted sunset. The evening breeze was exhilerating; the smell of the water said I was home; as did the sounds of the water lapping against the pier, and the gulls crying out. I enjoyed painting that evening and felt alone in a crowd, but not lonely.

Many, many people stopped to talk and ask me about the reddish underpainting I often use. I had some great conversations that evening. My favorite was with a man from Australia who was retired and had all the time in the world to paint, but something was stopping him. I finally said that it was most likely fear. I handed him a linen panel and my card and told him to email me when he'd finished this painting. He lives in St. Louis, and most likely will be out there painting with Shawn Cornell. He was fun to talk with and said he'd watched me painting for about an hour.

My entertainment, other than the sky, was listening and talking with a man and his two boys, ages 5 and 6. He was teaching them to bait hooks and cast their lines into the waters just beside where I was painting. He was patient with them, and praised them when they did a good cast. We got to talking and he and his boys were going out the next day on a friends sailboat, a boat just like the one "he'd traded in for his two boys.

In prepartion for a good time, they'd bought a Jolly Roger flag and he got them hats and eye patches. Kooooool!

What I didn't know was that I had taken a photo of that ship the day before the competition started. It was moored in the Fish Creek Harbor. You can see the flag and red furled sails in my photo even though I never noticed it until I downloaded my photos a week later. I'd like to have had a ride on that. I used to play pirate.