Caught Knapping

Its been awhile now that I redid my palette, a little bit like a golfer rebuilding their golf swing, it takes some getting used to. Midway through last year and for all of this year, the new palette setup has become quite familiar to me, it no longer requires too much conscious thought to do the paintings which is a good thing. When painting, ideally, there is not much standing between the scene and the paper. On a trip, I usually think a lot for the first few paintings, then somewhere in the middle I just paint. Like when I did Water Cascading Under Bridge, it was probably the tenth painting of the trip and I looked at the scene and said to myself, just paint it, there is no way to know how exactly. Another one like that was Sunset on Girouard, I was trying to think about how the heck to do that scene in less than ten minutes then said to myself, quit wasting time and just paint it! But that tends to only work with experience. I noticed this year that my brush is true, if I need to track one line against another, or apply the faintest of tints, or get the perfect side-drag for a water sparkle, then the brush is true. Having said that, there have been the occasional bombs, which don't make it onto the blog. The abstract painting shown above kind of looked like a carved stone pole or something, so I called it Caught Knapping, a pun on the word knapping (to carve stones) and napping (to sleep). 

Caught Knapping, watercolour 9 x 12" watercolour paper, September 2024