Up A Lazy Creek

Summertime and the living is not easy although its better than winter by a mile.It's my sinuses and the pollen today is at its highest this month somewhere around 210%. Drip, drip, drip and my nasal passages are like sandpaper. This is the start of today's outdoor painting trip. Breakfast, Thank God, is good. Picture perfect eggs, crisp hashbrowns and dry bacon..coffee so so...not bad Tim's turn to pay. I have an idea today of where we can go to paint. Tim wants to paint a creek. A creek, a lazy slow run with rivulets (water running through small pebbled creek beds). Actually, this is exactly what I had discovered a few days ago when my wife offered to take me out for a Sundae. We stopped and parked on the outskirts of town near the Coon Hunters Lodge. I said let's just sit on the rocks and eat our ice cream. A creek was running from last week's thunderstorms. I had to explore it. I have loved creeks from kidhood. They are the last remaining remnant of the primeval we have left in our Cro-Magnon brain. Yes, there's campfires but creeks are natural. They just happen because the land is not flat in spite of the glaciers that plowed Indiana thousands of years ago. So I made a mental note of the creek for Tim to paint the next time we were out.
Creeks are littered with stones and other interesting items dugout of the ground by the torrents when the creeks flood. They are storehouses for treasure...not the pirate kind but the kind that I loved when I was seven. I had a box that I hid my "finds" in and guarded them under my bed. And there was hell to pay if someone got into it. I still get a kick out of scouring the creek beds for interesting stuff.

Tim probably likes them for the same reasons. He is drawn to them like I am or he wouldn't mention them so often. So today we are painting the creek. I find a place to set up my chairs on the blacktop just a few feet from the bank. Tim moves closer and down the bank for a creek-run vantage point. The temperature is climbing and the humidity is running to catch up. By the time we are well into our artworks my shirt is clinging and the paint is 'runny' and dries so very slowly. Tim is having a time only because I can hear his discomfort. I am finishing up quicker because I decide to use the 'wet on wet look' in this piece. A way of taking a snaphot of this steamy May weather is what I am trying to achieve. The brush just pushes the wet color around like the creek is doing to the land around it. We finish about the same time as I can smell his fixative.

Here's my finsihed piece while Tim's is above.

All in all its been a good morning session in spite of the humidity. And maybe it's been successful just because of it. There's two dark and cold beers waiting for us. A short critique is also hashed over the 'suds.' "Hey, I like your artwork." "I like yours, too. Maybe if you took your finger and smoothed out the highlights on the water it would appear to be more 'watery'." More watery? Maybe its too hot to be drinking beer outdoors today??