Keuka Lake: Day 5, Friday

Friday, my last full day at Sunny Point; it's gone so fast, as time does when you're having fun! How did Van Gogh and other artists who worked before electric light and photographs paint night paintings? From their imagination? I'll tell you, it was a lot more difficult than I imagined.

I wanted to do a sunset view of Keuka from the screened in porch of the Red Barn, where I'd been painting this view every day. But I only had one canvas left for oils, and I also wanted to try a painting at night. The stars were so beautiful from the pier in front of the White Cottage and with a half moon, there were enough value contrasts to capture the scene.

But here's the thing -- if I painted in nothing but natural light, I couldn't see the paint on my palette. But if I turned the lights on, I couldn't see the scene well. I had a headband flashlight with me and it even had a red light: good for hiking in the Grand Canyon at 4 am before it got too hot when I walked there a few years ago.

And then I ran out of paint in some colors, so I basically just used whatever I could get on my knife and this was the result, at about 10 pm Friday night.  The second painting is one I sketched in acrylics at about 5 pm. See all 6 paintings in this series at Final Friday at the Pendleton Art Center in downtown Cincinnati tomorrow night from 6-10 pm.

Here's another little acrylic sketch I did around 5:30-6 pm of the White Cottage. I'm going to have great memories of this place -- it's been a wonderful week and, when I count them up, I've worked on 13 paintings and didn't have to worry about whether anyone liked them or not. It was all just for fun.