Lake of Fire

Florida landscapes are deceptively simple and gentle. That comes from the razing of the land for the purpose of development. The real energy, the substrata of energies, is a rumbling turmoil. Ever since I landed in Florida in 1987, the landscape shouts at me. It has been ripped to shreds, reshaped and denuded; her living inhabitants destroyed. To the normal eye, the landscapes are an easy set of greens. To my metaphysical brain, the landscape is angry. Like the planet Pandora in the blockbuster movie Avatar, the actual energy, the spirit of the land, is boldly disturbed.

The spirit of the land in Florida is ferocious.

This lake scene was painted at about 8 pm on a long summer night. The evening was one minute shorter than the night before. It still is a long lit evening. It was lovely. I found a spot to park and no one was in the parking lot. Some teens were hanging out by the picnic tables but that’s all the human company there was. As the painting continued, more and more people came to this lake to see the sunset with a lover, with a family, with their cameras and tripods. By the time I departed, the parking lot was filled up and my crooked parking really was annoying.

Dusk was mostly gray overhead. Top clouds graywashed the usually intense blue sky. At the lake, a hang-glider colored the sky. At the lake, the clouds were gray and black. At the lake, the sun burned. Forgetting my camera for backup photos, I quickly sketched in the major colors which were grays and yellows. Using the Mungyo pastels on the UART 320 sanded paper grits in the pastel sufficiently to finger blend. The Nupastels 96 augmented the colors missing in the Mungyo 64.

Eventually, I had to rub out the hang-glider. There were so many colors already competing in the lake and sky that there was no need for the hang-glider. What remained was the Floridian sunset dragonface.