September Evening at
Chinook Pass
36x36 inches
John W. Stinson ©2011
From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs but all I have done before the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy five I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At a hundred I shall be a marvelous artist. At a hundred and ten everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokosai, but today I sign my self "The Old Man Mad About Drawing." – Hokusai
I read somewhere that Hokusai walked straight into one of his last finished landscape prints getting smaller and smaller as he strode away and never turned back to wave good bye. Others reported he died at age 89. However it is generally agreed his most powerful works were created after age 60.
I paint and wait for the epiphanies to reveal themselves. It is the long road but what can you do? The real question is will I live long enough to paint the masterpieces I know are in me? The paradox is that when you exit life by way of your own painting then you will know you have arrived as an artist.
In the month of May traveling from Yakima to Seattle I wanted to go over Chinook Pass through Mount Rainier National Park. When we got there the pass had not opened yet so we detoured around and said we would return later in the year before Chinook Pass closes for the season in November. We made it back to the park in mid September and even stayed at the reconditioned lodge at the park so we could spend as much time as needed for capturing evening scenes. This painting (still in progress) is a result of the visit. My wife insisted on taking pictures with her cell phone and filming with her new toy (flip video) at the time . We went to the same spot on three consecutive evenings starting at a roadside parking lot on Highway 410 and walking a trail to get a better vantage point with the view looking east toward Yakima. My wife asking every night about the dirty air on the horizon and suggesting we go to a different spot. Yakima being an heavily agricultural area puts up large amounts of dirt into the atmosphere and that combining with auto and farm equipment pollution and ozone and maybe even a forest fire or two and not much wind on the mountain (very unusual) and I assume no winds in Yakima so the haze stacked into an amazing layered pinkish/ orange band of dirty color across the horizon. My wife was claiming the band of pollution was getting higher each night. When I said I did not think that it was she pulled out the flip video and ran clips from each of the three evenings and proved me wrong. She then went on to say no one would buy a painting with air pollution in it especially in such a pristine setting. Maybe not but I offered up that I'll burn that bridge when I get to it. I don't paint two thirds of what I sketch so no use worrying about that haze just yet.
When my wife was looking over old video she recorded she came across the Chinook Pass videos she recorded a year earlier and said look how beautiful the pink horizon looks!
