There are many paths and trails to walk or hike at Silver Bay, but this one leading to Slim Point, where a visitor can find a swimming beach, a picnic area, plus the Brooks Pavilion, or the pergola located there is one of the most popular places to visit. “Slim Point” is the area at the tip of a peninsula on the Silver Bay campus, which extends out several hundred yards into Lake George of the Adirondack Mountains, and affords easily accessible beautiful scenic lake views with surrounding mountains while looking up (North) or down the lake (South), as well as across the lake (East), and back toward the main part of the campus. It is also a popular location for watching the sun rise or set, and star gazing at night.
I worked on this painting for a couple of hours and was initially unsatisfied with the over all result; at the time I felt that the colors were off and not fresh looking enough. And so, I packed up my gear with the disappointingly “failed” painting, walked back to where I was staying, put the work away in a corner of the room, went to lunch, and didn’t look at it again for more than a week. When I next saw it, I was again reminded of how well it had started out, and how poorly I had finished it. I put it out of sight again. A couple days later I again saw the painting as I was sorting through a pile of paintings and decided that since the painting hadn’t grown on me over time, and didn’t satisfy or please me, then I had nothing to lose if I reworked it.
I recalled a story told me by one of my teachers, the watercolorist, Robert N. Blair, of Holland, New York. Robert was a personal friend and painting companion of artist Charles Burchfield. One day, when Robert went to visit Burchfield at his home in West Seneca, he found his friend with soft rags and a brush in hand kneeling next to and bent over the family bathtub. When Robert looked down into the tub he saw that it was partially filled with water, in which was a sheet of watercolor paper. Burchfield was in the process of soaking the paper, in order to scrub away a failed painting on it, which had been placed face down in the water. And doing likewise (not for the first time), I set my watercolor painting on the floor of the shower stall, turned on the water, and watched as the spray washed away most of the pigments as I gently scrubbed the surface with a soft paint brush, leaving behind a ghost image of the original painting when I had finished. I took this sheet of paper and my painting gear back to the location along the path where I had painted before, then set to work introducing new and cleaner color over the ghost image, and this piece is the final result. I dare say that I feel that it “cleaned up” reasonably well.