Painting Boldly

tinyExpanse North Idaho

A blogging, painting, exploring good time up north!

Today began with a glorious sunrise painted from City Beach, shortly followed by a tub of pigment-laden turpenoid spilled all over my lap. Ah, the ups and downs of the Plein Air painter.

Sunrise from City Beach

After City Beach, I spent some time at the ICL office painting edges of works from previous days, and then drove 20 minutes to the bottom of Schweitzer Mountain Resort. My plan was to take the lift to the top for a day of bird's eye view painting of the lake and the Scotchman Peaks. The lift runs from 10-5 every day of the week. Gearing up in the parking lot, I nervously decided to take a larger panel to the top with me - an 18x24. It's always tricky to transport wet oil paintings, especially the large ones, and especially down a ski lift! I bought my lift ticket and headed up.

Schweitzer is beautiful. At the base of the hill there is a little village with shops and apartments, but it's not super fancy and exclusive feeling like other ski resorts. From the top, one has a wonderful view of Pend Orielle and the surrounding mountains, and for the first time I was able to fully orient myself in my surroundings. This desert girl is just not used to so many trees and meandering bodies of water! My hunt for views of the sunrise and sunset have been laughable, repeating "never eat shredded wheat" to myself and trying to figure out over which hill the sun would come up. This is why I am not a sculptor - I work better in two dimensions.

The day yielded five tinyExpanses and a larger painting of Pend Orielle with the slopes of Schweitzer draping the foreground. I found a baseball field to hunker down in for the sunset back in Sandpoint and am now decidedly down for the count. Tomorrow - the glacial valley wetlands of Bonner's Ferry.

I have some musings on the perils of being alone with one's thoughts a little too long (perhaps the hardest part of being an artist), but that's for tomorrow.