Make Hay

The sun is out.
What are you doing about it., have you picked up your palette, opened the windows of your studio, grabbed a camera and left the TV and the computer far behind?

If you haven’t you ought to be ashamed. Now if this were Texas I could have some sympathy for your hiding in the house huddling under the air conditioner vent weeping and praying for fall. But this is Oregon, summer here means wearing a heavier shirt of a light jacket, not seeing home many times you can watch Harry Potter before they throw you out.

The variety we enjoy here in the Nay Area is beyond wonder, left we have the ocean, right the mountains and in-between the rivers and forests and all manner of adventures just waiting for an artist to freeze in film or on canvas.

Okay, it is probably hard to Plein air from a kayak, but don’t let that stop you and if you do take the kayak out where is your camera? Yes, I had one too; way back around 1999 I paid one of those numbers that have more than two zeros in it for my first digital camera. But it ain’t that way now. You can get a 14 megapixels camera for less than two hundred dollars and if it happens to die the death from being plunged in the water when your kayak tips over or you get mistaken for a seal and dumped by a great white shark, you can afford to go buy another one.

“Buying a Nikon doesn’t make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon owner.” So why buy the high priced spread? Think you can impress Kelle Herrick with your expensive camera? Ms Kelle could take winning pictures with a box camera so don’t think you can skip the part about getting up at two AM and squatting in a freezing bog waiting for the sun to come along and wake up the birds. Nope the price of the camera won’t make much difference if you aren’t going after wild ninja cranes.

So get a good cheap camera and take it with you, even if you are a painter. That camera can go where you’re canvas can’t and even better it will take pictures for you so that when you do face the blank canvas you have something to paint!

But canvas or camera won’t do you a bit of good if you don’t get out and enjoy this beautiful weather. Gardener, do plant still-lives. Sportsman, do baseball, soccer, bicycling, kayaking, motorcycling, yak wrestling, just do it. Don’t like any of those? Come up with your own. The Little Ole Opry by the Bay is working right now and I’ll bet, performers being performers they’d love a painter or photographer immortalizing their work, Live performance is hard to brag about because it requires you to be there. Ask permission, you’ll be surprised by the answer.
So why are you still reading this drivel?