Near Oneonta

Near Oneonta – Watercolor – 11 x 17 inches.

It is November and snow will arrive before night falls. I draw the pond and the bleak field as quickly as I can, for as long as my fingers can withstand the wind.

Sometime later on, I don’t remember how long afterwards, in the warmth of my studio, I painted the scene from memory. The sky unfolded into the paper as one of those accidents that can happen when you abandon the urge to control things and just allow watercolor do what it wants to do.

The red canoe was an accident as well. It appeared out of nowhere in my empty mind as a beautiful vessel, broken apart by water, like a heart can break open in sadness, or joy, or in both at the same time.

3 thoughts to “Near Oneonta”

    1. You know, Richard, that’s a perceptive question. Sometimes I think “Light” and other times I think “another storm.” Today I think “Light,” but maybe that’s because it’s raining.

  1. Never afraid, really, always bold and confident, you often dare to interrupt the serene and pastoral with rough elements from human experience. The broken canoe and the barbed wire fence are examples. If you cover the bottom third of the watercolor, eliminating the boat and fence, you have a very acceptable landscape of the countryside near Oneonta, but the canoe and fence take the viewer deeper, well into one’s imagination one’s speculation, one’s opportunity to share in the creation, not merely to observe it. It turns out, having read your observation about the medium, that the light and clouds are the result also of boldness and confidence: this time not to include but to allow watercolor to do what it does, to trust, not to control the medium itself.

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