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God's recipe for spectacular:

- Ten parts rugged rocky mountain

- Three parts glacier

- Seven parts debris slopes

- Four parts northern evergreens

- One glacial lake of impossible color

Create Rocky Mountains over, say, six or seven hundred million years (it's like a day to you). Throw in some ice ages to taste. After sufficient glacial events to get everything just so, wait, oh, say, 12000 years. Invite tourists. 

Continuing the theme from my last blog entry, the amazing teal and turquoise glacial waters of the Canadian Rockies simply must be seen to be believed.

Continuing a theme of many of these bog entries over the past few years, watercolor can be a bitch to work with.

Seriously, I can't tell you how many of my fellow artists just hate it. Refuse to work in it. Ah, but it is the challenge that matters. Remember the scene in A League of Their Own when the Geena Davis character quits and tells the Tom Hanks coach character that it all just got too hard. Tom Hanks snarls in reply something to the effect that if it were easy everybody would do it. "The 'hard' is what makes it great." That is watercolor in a nutshell.

There are two primary reasons for watercolor's challenge and allure. The one that drives most people crazy but doesn't bother me in the least is the way colors bleed into one another and go bonkers when you are heavy into the wet onto wet zone. The second, less obvious at first, and hardest thing to come to grips with is that it dries several tones lighter than it looks when the brush hits the paper. So you end up hitting it again, and it still doesn't look right when it dries. So you hit it again, and, too late, you've got ugly on your paper and no amount of anything you do can fix the problem. This is especially onerous when you are mixing blue, white, and a tad bit of yellow to achieve the teal of a glacial lake.

This has become my white whale.  

Moraine Lake, just outside of Lake Louise, is God's recipe for spectacular highlighted by a perfect vantage point captured in billions of photographs. On a partly cloudy day when the sun peaks out and then hides, the lake water shows more shades and intensities of blue green glow than the spectrum can possibly hold. It is amazing, and soul stirring and dang near impossible to replicate in watercolor. This painting, another study, is a case in point. What looked like teal when applied to the paper dried to boring blue. What looked like teal when I tried to fix the problem dried to even less interesting blah. After the third wash, failure was complete and I gave up on the lake. The mountains and other whatnot were fun to paint, although this is a style I think lends itself more to oil than to watercolor. Too garish. If salvaged by anything, it is the whimsy. But to me, this is one for the reject pile.

Stay tuned. The hard is what makes it worth it.

Crystal and I just spent a remarkable 11 days in Alberta and British Columbia. Was this the best vacation we've ever taken? Quite possible so. We'd heard many times that the Canadian Rocky Mountains stand among the most heavenly and breathtaking landscapes on earth, and nothing on this trip led us to dispute this assessment. Wildlife, wildflowers, waterfalls, glaciers, mountains - whether rugged or peaceful - all delighted the senses. When I viewed the glaciated landscape much of the geologic language I learned decades ago in college came tumbling back: U-shaped valleys, hanging valleys, moraines, triangular facets, drumlins, kames, and more.

The water in glacial areas is mind-blowing. In fast flowing rivers it is milk white. In lakes, the color ranges from sea-foam to teal to cerulean blue, changing moment to moment with dizzying brilliance as sunlight and shadow play games. Nature by Crayola.

This is the first of what I imagine will be many paintings inspired by this trip. The view of Lake Louise is world famous. Among our many photos were a few taken from behind a large flower filled planter on the grounds of the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise hotel. This is not an “official” painting, as I intended it solely to be a study. I didn’t sweat the underlying drawing; rather, I painted this to experiment with things like how to capture the amazing color of the lake water. Greens are created by mixing blues and yellows, and there are myriad possible combinations. When by themselves, colors read differently than they do when they are placed next to other colors. In this painting, the lake color by itself is nothing like the teal of Lake Louise. However, in the context of the rest of the painting around it, it at least begins to imply its luminescence.

I was not pleased with how I had rendered the mountains and glacier at first. They looked amateurish and timid. Sometimes when this happens, I grab a big old brush and start, well, cartooning on top of it all. If it works, great! If it doesn’t: big deal, it’s only a sheet of paper. I saw a quote recently along the lines of “I never lose. I either win or I learn something.” True for me as far as painting goes.

I think this time it kind of worked. I find whimsy and drama and fun in this watercolor. I certainly cannot claim that it captures the majesty of the actual scene; but I think it does show a place you might just maybe want to visit yourself someday.

Informational signs at overlooks throughout the Rockies told us why the glacial lakes have such astonishing colors. Glaciers grind the underlying rock to everything from SUV sized-boulders down to rock-flour. Rock-flour is exactly what it sounds like: rock particles ground as fine as the flour used to make bread. When sunlight tries to penetrate all the dissolved rock-flour in the glacial water, the result is absorption of all the wavelengths EXCEPT the blue ones. Yay! Give me a fist-bump for science.

Crystal and I took a raft trip on the Bow River outside of Banff. Our raft guide proposed a better reason. When asked why the river was such an amazing shade of blue, he thought for a moment and said, "Well, scientists will talk about minerals in the water and such, but I don’t think that’s the truth. The reason the water is blue is because it just makes you feel happy."

I hope this painting makes you feel happy.