Molly Hashimoto

Trees of Yosemite National Park

I just spent several days in Yosemite National Park, and though I loved the iconic Valley monoliths of El Capitan and Half Dome, what moved me more than anything else were the trees. We went to 3 sequoia groves, including Mariposa, Tuolumne and Nelder, and in each grove, found forests of incomparable, and rare beauty. The trees of the Sierra Nevada Mountains are so diverse, encompassing unusual lower elevation trees like digger pines and oaks, and higher elevation red firs, which are seen in very few other places.  I've resolved to do some paintings of many of these trees. Here I begin with some quick sketches of sequoias. It's impossible to show their marvelous size without something against which to measure them, but at least I managed to capture a little sense of their trunk texture and color.

Nature's Peace Calendar

Nature's Peace, a 2012 calendar which pairs my paintings with quotations from John Muir is published by Pomegranate Communications--it's available through the above link.
You can also find it in Seattle at the University of Washington Bookstore, City People's Mercantile, Puget Consumers' Coop, Daniel Smith Artist Materials and the Seattle Audubon Shop.

Watercolor Sketch at Washington Pass

The fresh snow we observed on Liberty Bell Mountain last weekend in the class I taught for the North Cascades Institute made sketching a bit more difficult. I don't bring masking fluid out into the field with me, so sketching South Early Winters Spire required a little deft brush work to avoid the patches of snow. I worked on dry paper to keep those areas white, and didn't add the cast shadows until I had gotten back to our classroom. I used a medium value of pure cobalt blue for the shadows.

Here's my photo of the spire and you can see what I was working with. I exaggerated the gold of the larches, and probably left more snow than was actually there. I had a huge backrun occur on the sky, and did a little creative wiping out to fix it, figuring I might show a little bit of the cirrus clouds that began to form as we painted (and after this photo was taken).

Painters at Washington Pass

Here are several of the intrepid painters from the recent landscape watercolor class I taught at the North Cascades Institute. Time of day here was about 11am. When we arrived there were no clouds in the sky, but gradually long strokes of cirrus began reaching across the sky. I regretted starting my sketch before they appeared, as clouds can add alot of drama to a sketch.

 

Here's another photo of painters with Silver Star Mountain to the east.

North Cascades Institute October Weekend

Last weekend I taught a watercolor workshop at the North Cascades Institute. The highlight was, without a doubt, the trip to Washington Pass to see Liberty Bell Mountain.  We left the Learning Center at 8:30am, in order to appreciate the early morning light on the spires; here you can see the fresh snow, and understand the name of the peaks seen left: South and North Early Winters Spires. Notice the great light--it's not easy to get that in autumn, as the sun angle at our latitude is rather extreme.

 Here is the same view about an hour later. What a difference. It's much more backlit, a situation we encountered last fall. I struggled to paint that-- and determined that this time we would get out very early for best light.

Yellowstone Sketch: Canary Spring

We sketched at Canary Spring in September when I visited with my Yellowstone Institute class; in previous posts I have featured students' work. This is what I came up with and I was happy with the ethereal quality of it--for me this is what watercolor can do like no other medium. I think John Henry Twachtman's oil paintings of the pools are marvelous, but few other oil paintings have done them justice. I've been re-reading John Berger, whose thinking on art was so seminal in the 70s. In Ways of Seeing he talks about the contrast between oil painting and watercolor: What distinguishes oil painting from any other form of painting is its special ability ro render the tangibility, the texture, the lustre, the solidity of what it depicts. It defines the real as that which you can put your hands on. It is interesting to note here the exceptional case of William Blake. As a draughtsman and engraver Blake learned according to the rules of the tradition. But when he came to make paintings, he very seldom used oil paint, and although he still relied upon the traditional conventions of drawing, he did everything he could to make his figures lose substance, to become transparent and indeterminate one from the other, to defy gravity, to be present but intangible, to glow without a definable surface, not to be reducible to objects. This wish of Blake's to transcend the 'substantiality' of oil paint derived from a deep insight into the meaning and limitations of this tradition. Blake found watercolor more appropriate for his purposes, and it's that vaporous quality that I love so much. It captures the fleeting moment and experiences that pass away before we can even really register them, before they solidify into memories.

North Cascades Institute 25th Anniversary Picnic

Last Saturday the North Cascades Institute 
celebrated their 25th anniversary with a picnic at the Environmental Learning Center. Hikes and canoe rides were offered-- I got to go out on the canoe for a trip that was nearly an hour long and paddled up to this view of Ruby Mountain and Logan Peak. The day was partly sunny with incredibly still waters by afternoon, something that is pretty rare up there. We listened to some short and entertaining speeches from young people who had recently participated in outdoor programs, and the director, Saul Weisberg, spoke about the goals and accomplishments of the Institute. At the end, he expressed his ardent wish that the people who participate in the wide range of programs offered go home changed, with the hope of making the world a better place.