Rainbow Lake,
Azusa (Fall)
Robert Winter, 2004 

Acrylic on Canvas
18" x 24"

Giclee Print:   $400
On Sheet Canvas, Unframed

Framed Original:  Not currently for sale

Artist's Notes

Rainbow Lake is actually a community of condominiums, but in summer and fall, the trees lining the lake allow only fragmentary glimpses of the structures behind.  Rather than show a lot of scattered portions of foundations and stairways and so forth, I eventually decided to show only one reasonably-complete balcony, and let that suggest the rest.

Although Rainbow Lake is man-made, it’s ultimately based on the naturally-occurring San Gabriel River, and it’s been in existence for quite some time as an angling club.  Movie stars and other well-heeled folk used to stop here in the 30s on their way up to mountain communities like Big Bear.  They’d catch their lunch, and the locals would fry it up for them.

Residents can still catch fish here, although there’s a catch-and-release rule on many species, and you want to make sure you don’t even accidentally hook the big brightly-colored koi.

In painting this, I very deliberately carried forward the “splotchillism” techniques I had cultivated in other paintings.  The techniques are probably most apparent in the mountains, which are just dabs of brownish and bluish colors applied with a broad brush.  What I like best about them is the way they don’t need to fill up the spaces around them. This enables the physical structures to, in a sense, fall away, and let everything become part of a more interrelated whole, defined by the varying effects of light.

I think this sort of effect is ultimately behind a lot of the kinds of images we find compelling.  Variegated light effects are a prime characteristic of water, for example.  And what’s a better generator of dappled light than a tree?

 

© COPYRIGHT 2004 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.