


Sweet Reflections. Painted February 2022. 24”x24”. Acrylic on Canvas.
Just a few hundred meters away from the Bluff is a heron rookery, so it is very common to find a heron standing motionless on shoreline rocks near the bottom of our ramp in a perfectly transcendental state. If an animal can exist totally in the moment, at one with the world around them, it would be herons at sunset on the Salish Sea. I would like to believe that they are reflecting on the beauty in front of them, considering great meta-physical questions about life and the universe, although it is more likely that they are just keeping a keen eye out for a slow fat fish to swim by their rock.
I didn’t intend for this painting to be quite as colourful as it turned out to be, but the setting sun was creating a rainbow effect on the clouds, which in turn reflected on the mirror surface of the water and even on the rocks along the shoreline. I decided to open up my palette and just let the colours sing. I’m finally getting a technique that allows me to smoothly blend colours in acrylic paint and achieve the effects I am looking for. Since everything was bathed in a soft evening light, the only hard edges were on the foreground rocks and the heron.
This is my 48th painting and I finally feel like I’m starting to make progress. I am usually not satisfied with a painting when I’m done. There are always several items I would fix or change if I could. I think this is the first time where the results have aligned with my expectations and I’m happy to move on to my next painting. It was an enjoyable painting to paint and I hope it’s going to cheer up any wall on which it is hung.