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This is another painting inspired by a recent visit to Iceland.  This amazing waterfall, named Gullfoss, sends the previously relatively placid river Hvita through two right angle cascades into an extremely narrow gorge where the mist makes it look like the earth is swallowing millions of gallons of water whole.  It's a fabulous thing to see, and unlike Niagara Falls, it is surrounded on all sides by undisturbed natural beauty rather than casinos and Hard Rock Cafes.

Like Geysir (see the blog from February 2, 2017), Gullfoss is part of Iceland's famous Golden Circle.  I suppose this means that I will someday need to paint something from Pingvellir National Park to complete the trilogy.

When I am not painting, I work in the environmental field and my college education is in geology.  So the architecture of Gullfoss – those right angles – is quite interesting to me.  There are any number of reasons some rock erodes with angularity:  mineral orientation, layering, fracturing.  Since Iceland is a baby, geologically speaking, and essentially comprised of volcanic rock sculpted by glaciers and subsequent erosion, it has its own geologic logic.  Essentially, meltwater from Langjokull glacier eons ago found a fissure or two in the basalt (lava rock), viciously slashed a left-right-left pathway through it, and has charged mightily on ever since.  It's a variant of the classic Rock Paper Scissors, with a twist.  When water and rock first meet, rock ALWAYS wins, which is why the falls zig-zag the way they do.  Except that erosion has its own set of rules.  Given enough time (geologists tend to view time in units of millions or even hundreds of millions, of years), water will ALWAYS beat rock.  Come back in a few million years and see.  Gulfoss will eventually be no more.

Enough geology lesson.  Let's discuss the painting.  If you Google Gullfoss images you will see almost nothing other than photographs from this vantage point.  It is a spectacular view.  The thing is, the geologic processes discussed in the previous paragraph rudely gave no consideration whatsoever to the needs of future painters.  The bottom right quadrant is essentially a black mossy monolith of stone that mocks every governing rule of thumb applicable to the composition of an image.  This is not a problem in photography, but it's frankly a booger to paint something solid black receding into the distance.  One of my painting friends suggested that she'd be tempted to not include it.  But then it would not be Gullfoss. 

Also, by virtue of camera limitations and this landscape, most images of Gullfoss tend to be mostly waterfall and not much sky.  I wanted to challenge this.  With all due apologies to Montana, Iceland is also Big Sky Country and I wanted to honor this in the painting. 

Why the title Signour Tomasdottir?  In the early 20th century, Gullfoss appealed terrifically to certain parties as the perfect location for a hydroelectric power plant.  Signour (the daughter of then Gullfoss owner Tomas Tomasson) saved the falls from this fate.  She lived on a nearby farm and loved the beauty.  As part of her protest against destroying the falls, she walked many times from Gulfoss to Reykjavik (120 kilometers) to speak against it.  There is even some suggestion that she may have walked barefoot; I read one history stating that she spoke fervently with bleeding feet.  Ultimately, when it seemed that her efforts had failed, she threatened to throw herself into the falls as her ultimate protest.  Her efforts were successful and today Gullfoss is federally protected land.

If any of this is the something new you learned today, you're welcome.

*Signour’s name, along with many of the other Icelandic names and words used herein, is jammed packed with umlauts and accent marks.  All of which are beyond this blogging platform's ability to harness.  Humor me, just pretend I spelled things correctly.

When I first began to paint seriously, I did what most amateur artists do:  I copied other people’s paintings and I tried to reproduce photographs.  These are great tools as far as learning the mechanics of painting – what happens when you do this or attempt that (all of which tends to be exactly opposite of what we were attempting, which is how we, or at least I, learn to paint).  It’s considerably less useful when it comes to creating that indefinable something we call “art.”

A spectacular photograph, the one that captures the sunlight just right or so-and-so’s expression so perfectly…well, in my opinion they can be the worst things to work from.  They are already perfect, and I can’t tell you how much paint I’ve wasted over the years trying to reproduce that perfection rather than distilling it into something else. 

So here’s a trick I discovered.  Use crummy photographs instead.

A few years ago, my wife and I took a lovely afternoon cruise on Skaneateles Lake in New York, during which I snapped a photo of a passing sailboat.  Of course, only having an iPhone camera and shooting into the sun between two moving objects, what I got was a slightly blurry shot in which the sailboat took up maybe 4% of the image.  When I cropped it to highlight the sailboat, I got an extremely blurry but better composed monochromatic image, but at least the sailboat was more prominent.  It was the classic crummy photograph; one which would qualify for the delete button except that I decided to paint it. 

Which freed me.  The photograph became reference for things like the size and shape of the boat and sail in comparison to the horizon and that was it.  With respect to the shapes and colors of the water, boat, shoreline, houses, sky (even whether clouds were there) and clothing worn by the skipper, I was on my own.  I could do whatever I wanted.  And what this allowed for was that the integrity of the painting itself became the master, not the misguided notion that because a photograph depicted “this” – whatever “this” is – I had to also. 

I like this painting.  A lot.  I don’t consider among my very best, but it stands for two terrific lessons learned.  One – that it is possible to create visually pleasing paintings from “blah” photographs.  Two -  paintings must have their own truth. 

If you paint and are feeling in a rut, give it a try.  Go through your photos with an eye towards finding a real loser, and then paint it.  You might be astounded at where this leads.

My wife and I were recently in Iceland, unique amongst all the places we’ve ever visited.  This is my first attempt to capture its wild beauty in a painting. 

In our annual Christmas letter I described Iceland as the landscape of the Moon painted green, black and gold and punctuated by steam.  That’s way too wordy for a painting title, so this is just called “Icelandic Steam.”  While I was painting it I reflected that one of the things that makes Iceland so visually fascinating is the absence of trees.  Quick history lesson:  there were trees when the Norse first settled, but they razed every single one of them creating farms and building boats.  The few trees now growing in Reykjavik were planted for decorative purposes.  Joke told to us by a local:  If you ever get lost in the woods in Iceland, just stand up and you’ll be fine.

The painting depicts the landscape near Geysir and Strokkur.  Geysir (pronounced Geese Ear) is the origin of our English term geyser (according to the infallible Wikipedia, it was the first geologic hot water shooter known to modern Europeans and written about, so the name became the common noun.  Sort of like if the first bearded fat bald guy ever seen was me, then the term for any bearded fat bald guy would be “hey, that guy’s an “Anthony”).  Geysir the geyser is an old geezer - hasn’t erupted in years.  Strokkur, its baby brother, is more hot-tempered and blows its top every five to ten minutes and is therefore doomed to perpetual encirclement by tourists holding fingers on the shutter buttons of their cameras.  Neither Geysir nor Strokkur are shown in the painting; rather, it depicts the landscape of the general area.  I don’t recall traveling more than 15 minutes in any direction in Iceland without seeing steam venting from the ground.  Another local told us that Icelanders leave certain hot springs for the tourists to befoul and zealously keep the best ones their own little secret.  The nerve!  Imagine if we kept all our Grand Canyons to ourselves and only let tourists from Iceland see roadside ditches. 

This was painted in a big room full of fellow members of the Wednesday Night Painting Group (see Link).  As is often my case, I sat off by myself painting as though in a race, with a flurry of jabbing and scraping brush strokes, contributing rarely to the group conversation, and then only to make one of my awful jokes.  (WNPG Observation:  How can you tell when Anthony’s not there?  The jokes are funny for a change).  As is also often my case, I paid very little attention to accurately capturing the actual geometry of the landscape in this painting, and the colors I used are perhaps jarringly cartoonish compared to the real place.  Still, I think it captures the “feel” of Iceland.  I hope you do too.  Of course, if you’ve never been there you’ll have no way of knowing, but you can trust me.  After all, I’m an Anthony.