Journeying Through Technicolor Tunnels

Another day exploring the world of paint and plein air on the North Shore of Kaua'i.

There’s something about showing up to the shoreline with an idea in my pocket with a sense of pure curiosity where the colors will take me.

Everytime I paint, I have beginners eyes once again. This painting started exactly like that — a quiet experiment that turned into a surprise. Some washes of magenta, some play, some curiosity… and I was in deeper than expected, swimming in color under the warm Hā‘ena sun and Makana Mountain over me.

Setting up for plein air is always its own little voyage.

I haul what feels like half my studio across the sand and then somehow still convince myself it’s “minimal.” But the moment I drop everything in the shade and look up at this place — the ridges catching light, the ocean shifting like a kaleidoscope — I know I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.

Once I’ve had a small kine swim, taken a breath of where I am, and let the place settle into me, I begin.

Step one: set up my tiny traveling studio.

Step two: line my paints by warm and cool, transparent and opaque.

Step three: paint.

And oh, to begin with transparent magenta. A single wash of that color against the deep greens of Hā‘ena lights my world. It’s such a cheerful entrance into the painting — playful, warm, impossible to ignore.

This day, the land offered color. Unreasonably beautiful, wholehearted, color: magenta giving way to turquoise, a whisper of peach against a cool blue shadow, everything moving and alive.

I painted what it felt like to stand inside that moment, to be with the space. The warmth, the vibrancy, the quiet electricity of being held by ocean and mountain.

Then to the opaque layers.

I felt energized and I couldn't help but notice the color of the landscape was practically about to burst into a super-nova. And so I chose all my most radiant colors- quite literally the 'Radiant' line by Gamblin- and painted madly away, from my heart. From the energy of the space, the feeling in my chest in this special place, this little cosmic vortex of a beach.

Sometimes I feel like an astronaut flying off into painting space, a place where my mind buzzes with creativity and astral moments of painting insight. Or like a scientist swirling their experiments in a lab, only my situation involves beloved paint tubes, a canvas, and a whole lot of sand.

Technicolor Tunnels

11" x 15" oil on canvas

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