Evening on the YakimaBhagwan Shree Rajneesh said "Your memory is beautiful, it will take you places you have never been". Now that I think of it maybe it was Mark Twain. Anyway, most of the time the way I go about collecting information for a painting is with a black marker and a note book. A small sketch is done in minutes and notations about color are put in the margins. By the time I get around to processing those crude sketches into paintings months or longer may have passed so of course memory, imagination and various other factors combine with the sketches and notations on the margins to produce the paintings. Some of the places I frequently go to have made deeper and deeper impressions on me so I am confident as to my ability to render the scene in a way that is a meaningful representation of the time and place being captured. Is this the best way to go about it? I don't know and don't care. It is the way I do it. Last year (I think it was last year) in Yakima I went to a spot along the Yakima River in the early evening to make my sketches and my wife joined me as she often does. After the sketches are done we just sit and watch with as much alertness as can be mustered. She likes to come along just for this reason. Just sitting and being alert is one of her meditation practices. For me it is one of my painting practices.
Close to a year has passed and we both have some agreements on what we saw and what happened when we were sitting in the location where the scene in this painting is depicted but she says this painting is nothing like what she remembers. After a long discussion about it all I could say is wait a few weeks with this painting. It will be what you remember.
Frame from Mountains Edge Frames
