bay

Bay is all about lake, sky, and land.  We are high here, looking down at the bay and, seemingly, across with the sky!  This is a quick color sketch, with some amount of detail and layering in the field.  The sky is quite close to the paper.  The field is partly dried, partly in flower.  The colors are slightly more violet, and the field flowers are different; still, there is some resemblance of our northern bay with the Mediterranean near Cap d' Ail or Nice.

near Suttons Bay, August 1

near Petoskey, July 31

The same field flowers are in these views, seen a day apart.  One field has color in the field flowers; the other field's grasses and flowers are already quite dried out, seeds and seed heads much more predominant than flowers.  Suttons Bay is in a protected bay of Lake Michigan.  Petoskey is farther north and the bay there is more open to weather from the west over Lake Michigan.  Diane told me that Suttons Bay just didn't get much rain this summer; the rain has passed over and passed to the north often.

The top painting here is the same field as the field in the previous post, three weeks later.  I was leaving the hill and the small house and shed caught my eye, almost engulfed by the fields.  Of course the house is important here, centered; still, the fields provide its stage, its display.

between developments

hill overlooking Suttons Bay

This small painting I did in the studio, from a watercolor sketch on site.  The site is a hill in northern Michigan's Leelanau Peninsula looking down toward a bay of Lake Michigan.

I sat in my car to do the watercolor.  There is a dirt two-track in view at the lower left.  This path comes up to a paved lane, where I'm parked.  This lane is part of the infrastructure for a whole new subdivision: paved lanes, cul-de-sacs, fire hydrants, power cables.  The big hill has been set up for houses; a big cherry farm was bull-dozed to make way for the development.  Behind me here, just up the hill further, there are 5 houses, almost finished but boarded up, windows broken.  One house is partially painted.  This development stopped, went bankrupt.

As long as I did not look behind me, the view was dazzling.