(Left) Restless Reflection on Norton Lake (Right) Hidden Creek To Waterfall by Jan Dow)
If you look hard and long enough, water will reveal layers of pictures that can change by the moment. At first glance, simple shapes and colors appear. You think you “see” the reflection. But wait a minute… the colors and shapes shift and become more complex. Look still more closely, and other layers will appear. These new layers are not what you initially saw. It’s a process of visual hide and seek.
When I first discovered and became fascinated by this phenomenon, I was 17 years old. I was deciding what to paint during a plein air watercolor workshop at the beach in La Jolla, California. Everyone else was headed off to find grand sea and beach vistas. But what drew me in was a cove with small cliffs that had deep caves and gently moving water. Brilliant colors of yellow and gold reflected from the cliffs onto the water, right next to equally intense dark blues and greens of the caves, the images moving, always moving… I couldn’t look away. And the more I looked, the more the reflections evolved. I was hooked.
Then life took a turn, and I didn’t get back to painting for decades. Finally, now living in Bend, I was able to carve out the time and energy to take pastel landscape workshops. The brilliance of color and immediacy of application lit my artistic fire. At the same time I discovered photos I had taken on a trip up the lower Snake River. The reflections of those cliffs on the water fascinated me once again. But my painting attempts fell flat. I had preconceived ideas of what I was seeing in the reflections, and they did not match the reality of what was there. So I kept studying those reflections, and gradually, the true shapes and colors were revealed to me. And since then, every painting with water finds me seeking those more complex layers hidden in the reflections.