Seeing these two children in their quest to find minnows in the park stream brought back childhood memories of summers when my friends and I would explore and play along the creek that was the northern boundary for our little village, and bordered one side of my parent’s property where we lived in Central New York.
During those summers we spent near endless hours engaged in various outdoor activities. We fished for Trout (and usually caught Sunfish, Suckers, Perch, Bullheads, or nothing); searched for bugs, minnows, turtles, frogs, crayfish, fools gold, and quartz crystals; made forts; engineered and constructed dams to build swimming holes; talked about life, found fossils; made bows and arrows, foraged and browsed on wild raspberries, black caps, currents, and strawberries; and invested numerous hours in boat racing – wherein we made detailed racing rules, independently carved and constructed our small, hand-sized toy wooden “boats” – basically variations on a canoe or raft shaped hull with fancy details added for aesthetics, or for assumed enhanced speed and efficient maneuverability – made exclusively from dried tree branches, twigs, and leaves. We would have regattas and compete against each other on complex boating raceways of alternating fast and still water that we created by moving and rearranging creek rocks, stones, pebbles and sediment in order to shape, control, and alter the general course, speed and directional movement of the creek’s flowing water with cataracts, whitewater, bends, strong currents, still pools, dead ends, obstacles, snags, and whirlpools…
I could continue to list additional activities and details, many of which may be familiar to your own experiences, but I assume that the point has been made here on how, for the artist, seeing something ordinary, unremarkable, or unexpected can sometimes stimulate the making of art, and also how in turn a work of art, for the viewer, has the interesting ability to evoke distant memories and emotions in us.
On this particular day I went to a park, located not far from my home, to participate in a plein air painting event that was organized and sponsored by the local art museum. At the time, I had every intention of focusing on making a painting of a landscape view I had observed just a few days previously. I was mulling over in my mind about how I might arrange the composition, which pigments I would use or not use, and how I might use colors, values, and brush strokes to express the mood, lighting, objects, cast shadows, and details. I had already gotten myself set-up, paints laid out, and started working for awhile on my objective when I realized I needed to take a break to relax for a moment, evaluate my progress, and sip some coffee, and that is when I heard laughter coming from nearby, and turned to see the source. As a result of yielding to my curiosity I came back home that afternoon with this much different painting in hand than what I had planned on making when I had left the house. I still haven’t yet attended to the park subject I was initially interested in painting, but in due course I will, and hopefully soon.