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Fly Fishing At Big Niagara, Baxter State Park

      a watercolor 18 inches by 24 inches

Monday, August 8th, 2011

  The next morning I hiked out to Big Niagara in Baxter State Park once again. I set up where I drew and painted a watercolor study yesterday; the same time and place. I had a breakfast to march on that morning and decided that today I would be a man on a mission. The weather had cleared and the clouds lifted. I received my first full view of Katahdin from Daisey Pond early in the morning.  It was going to be a great day to paint. My plan was to do at least two 18 in. x 24 in. watercolor study paintings today. The first painting was going to be completing the Big Niagara study that I started yesterday. The second would be of Katahdin from Daisey Pond campground. The painting of Big Niagara was going well throughout the morning and I almost completed the painting when a party of  six people came right out where I was trying to reach yesterday. I thought that there must have been an easier way across than the way I tried to navigate yesterday and these people found it. In my morning conversation with BSP ranger Andy Vietze, the park ranger at Daicey Pond, I found out that I could cross at the dam further up from the falls and pick up the trail there. The two fisherman that I depicted on the upper right are regulars and fly fish often at that very spot that I tried to reach yesterday. I found out from ranger Andy that one of the men was Joe McSwain and another older man fishing along side of him was a relative. There was also two men and women who looked on. They seemed surprized to see me so far down at the base of the falls actually painting in their direction and they would look back at me often. The two men began fishing almost immediately. The other two women and men never fished but looked on while the two men I include in my painting study began fishing together almost side-by-side.  It’s interesting to me how much these figures in a landscape activated it and provided immediate scale to what you were looking at. I definitely wanted to capture them, but my painting was already completed where they were standing. Fortunately the space above where they stood was clear unpainted paper in my study, so I sketched them in a smaller scale and further back.  This is why they look as though they are casting into the falls. But I did feel that was better than not including them at all. Relying on a photograph would have shrunk the falls and men in a distorted scale to each other. Since this was a study it wasn’t as important to get their positioning right as it was to get accurate color and scale. I took several photos from all directions of where they were actually standing. I would fix their placement later using the study to rely on scale. 

 After the painted watercolor study was completed, I taped clear Mylar tracing paper over the painting and drew where the fishermen were actually going to be standing in the painting and in correct scale. I also traced all the rest of the landscape around them. I would promise myself to include them in the right place in the final watercolor painting in my studio later in the year. Often what will happen, I will draw (on the Mylar tracing paper overlay, which is an old cartoon method I call my drawing “Tool”) other people or even the same person in another place that I have encountered throughout the day. For example, the same older man to the upper right who was fly fishing in my study was also the same man swimming in the pool just in front of me in the afternoon. The figure in the foreground I met yesterday on the Appalachian Trail on my way to Big Niagara. His name was Necello.  I included him where I was standing, even though he may have never stood there. I drew him turned away from the view and toward the viewer just as if he had seen it and was continuing on the AP trail.

 Fly Fishermen at Big Niagara, Baxter State Park

       a drawing tool 18 inches by 24 inches 

In the final painting I took both of these figures out to make the painting less confusing. Back home in my studio I painted the final painting by tracing the study and reworking the two figures by positioning them in the actual place they were standing. I also drew them with more definition and in a larger scale since they were closer to the viewer.  Photographs are notorious for shrinking figures down in the background. I allowed the image to be only about the two men fly fishing at Big Niagara Falls because they were the only ones that day that were actually interacting with the falls. I decided to consider using the swimmer in the foreground  and Necello in other paintings that would follow. In this final painting I began by painting a Chinese White ground on the painting surface where the water descends and cascades over rock and swirls into emerald colored pools in the foreground. The rocks I left raw 140 lb cold pressed Arches watercolor paper. This allowed my colors of the water to pop and for me to be able to retrieve my whites when needed in the foam and current of the water. The raw paper allowed me to create a more translucent and solid pinkish orange rock in order to contrast the fluidity of the water. This would have been an interesting painting even without the figures. But to me, by adding them, it evoked more truth between the figures and landscape toward a much more engaging painting. There are many views of this location to paint and it is only about 1.5 miles from Daicey Pond campground in Baxter State Park.