On the last day of the winter session of my painting classs, the project was to do a quick painting of a photo of a bunch of flowers, but I had already done that the week before, so I chose to do something with a photo I took the previous summer. We had been spending a few days in the Big Sur area, and stopped at Nepenthe for a coffee at the cafe below the restaurant. I noticed this woman admiring the view and snapped a shot of her with my phone. Since we were having our usual potluck for the last day of class, I painted fairly quickly, trying to keep it simple with large areas of solid color.
For the first class of the spring session, I found one of my old photos from the mountains. Around 20 years ago, we were camped at Mammoth Lakes, and one day I hiked up beyond Crystal Lake to the top of Mammoth Crest. I was enjoying walking across this high plateau when this dead tree caught my eye and I got a photo of it. I thought it captured some what I love about this timberline country. After I had painted this one, I remembered that I had painted the same scene many years ago, so I dug out my old painting and compared them. Although my old one was not bad, the new one was much better, and I really like it.
While I was looking through old photos, I also came across an older one that I thought would be good to paint. One night around 1970, I drove up through Yosemite alone to Saddlebag Lake, and the next day climbed Mt. Conness, at 12,590 ft., the highest Sierra peak north of Tioga Pass. It was quite an adventure which involved crossing a glacier, crossing the bergschrund on a snow bridge and a bit of class 3 climbing on the face above it. I didn't have an ice axe or crampons, which would have been appropriate for the steep snow of the glacier, and on the way down I fell and slid quite a distance, luckily with no injuries but a few scrapes and bruises. As I passed the first lake below the glacier, I shot the photo that inspired this painting. The turquoise blue of the lake is typical of lakes below glaciers.
