When someone looks at my paintings the first thing they usually say is, “these are watercolors?”. It’s true you don’t often see watercolors so bold and bright - vibrant…radiant and defined. My first one wasn’t. That was in 1975. Can’t say I liked it much but I kept it and always had it hanging somewhere. More as a reminder that I wanted to paint than anything else. After a short hiatus of about 30 years I finally did.
For more than 25 years I’ve been an instructor/guide in the educational-travel industry (though currently I’m starting to think of myself more as friend/personal guide/life coach). Fifteen years ago I started running houseboat trips on L. Powell. In 2005 I convinced my boss we should offer a watercolor class (mostly because it would give me the excuse to paint, but it turned out to be very popular). He sent Noel Elliott. I taught Noel houseboating. She taught me watercolor. She was a better student than I was.
Noel is petit and ethereal, as are her paintings with their colors blending and ephemeral, swirling out of Patanga Canyon where she lived in the 1960’s. I tried it, but it wasn’t working. The world I saw around me just didn’t look that way. My world is the often surrealistically bizarre landscapes and sharp, stark, brightly lit color of the southwest, especially the Colorado Plateau. (Sometimes I imagine photons of sunlight becoming trapped in the crystal structure of the fine quartz sand, being buried, turning to rock and today eroding; the grains exposed again and the photons, finally finding their way out, causing the cliffs to glow with the desert sunlight of two hundred million years ago.)
The usual questions of the people I ferry around run along the lines of, “Does being here all the time make you take it for granted?”. At which point, I tell them, “The Navajo have a saying - I walk in beauty. What I take this to mean, is you can’t spend your life standing awe struck, you have to go about the business of living. But that doesn’t mean you stop noticing. Living where I’m always surrounded by so audacious a reality in no way cheapens the place, rather, it allows a deeper understand. Being here makes for an easier realization that I am a part of it and it is a part of me, that at some point there is nothing distinguishing two. (Much easier than if you’re stuck in rush hour wondering if you’ll get to work on time, or worrying about how you‘ll pay for the kids braces).
Some people interpret this to mean I’m being spiritual or mystical. Spiritual and mystical cheapen a place by trying to turn it into something other than it’s simple reality. Look around. You see a glorious panorama, but if someone is over there looking this way, you are a part of the glorious panorama they see. No choice, no option, you are inescapably a part of the whole. As inseparable from it as you are from one moment becoming the next. We walk on the cutting edge of an evolving physical reality, the cusp of a droplet of life swirling through the solution of time, endlessly stepping into a future and stitching together all that was with all that will be.
You might come to that realization anywhere, but the outrageous places rub our noses in it and remind us more easily. - I walk in beauty.
So, I try to paint the world I see. A window to look through as a reminder. Or I think I do. Sometimes I have to wonder if these aren’t all, in some way, self portraits. On the other hand, Grama liked bold, bright colors. Maybe it’s just a genetic thing.
