Tale of the Underground

Friends –

This is a very different painting for me and you are more than justified in asking, "What the !?!!!??". But don't freak out too much before I get a chance to tell you that this is a real place.

Of course, reality is in the eye of the beholder and reality can change depending on the freedoms that you allow your own mind. As for my own mind, this is how I now see this place and I doubt that I will ever see anything less.

The first time I visited this drainage from Lexington Dam was in June 2015 with my grandson, Benjamin. We were aiming to take a nice hike up to the lake, but his short legs combined with his almost-seven-year-old imagination would not let us venture beyond this sweet creek access point. Instead, we waded the water while his enormous imaginings went into high gear. His conversation was loaded with fisher-kid talk and before I knew it, he was claiming that there were crawdads in the creek. I dubiously waded farther in with him and either my imagination blended with his, or we both saw the biggest, orangest crawdad ever! We eventually went back to Grandma Alice's house to tell her the tale.

Two years later I was participating in the Los Gatos Plein Air event. The weather was blistering hot for the downtown paint out competition. I deemed it too exhausting to paint on the seething pavement of Main Street, so I went underneath with my painting gear.

The first iteration of this painting on that day was quite representational in the images and showed a good comparison of the temperature differences from above ground and the underground. But somehow, that level of 'realism' was just not telling the tale for me. So, more than one year later, I added the elements of exploration, mystery, imagination and crawdad hunting that I experienced with Benjamin. It is not my typical painting, I know. But I like it better now, nevertheless.

"Tale of the Underground" is available for a donation to a worthwhile non-profit.

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