Friday night we took a tour offered by a local company which offers a three-hour evening tour in the bay of Reykjavik.  The boat goes pretty far out — almost an hour from port — but not quite into the open North Atlantic Ocean.  The company makes no guarantee that you will see anything; but clearly the draw is the possibility of seeing whales and porpoises.  We didn’t.  We did see lots of sea birds, including large ganets, small puffins, and several different kinds of gulls — all busily going after their dinner.  By summer Iceland standards it was a warm night, but it still gets pretty cold out on the water.  We were all wearing several layers, including waterproof outer layers; winter gloves and hats.  And so we got cold, but not too cold.  There was always the option of being inside, but would’ve meant missing whomever showed up near the boat.  Boat left at 8:30p and didn’t return till midnight.  On the way back we were “serenaded” by a local singer/guitarist who would have done well to sing Icelandic songs.  Instead he chose everything from John Denver to Neil Diamond

to Bob Dylan.  Bad!!  But we got a good laugh out of it.

Norma and i, along with our friends Pattie and Sherry, are on vacation in Iceland.  Norma and i arrived 4 days ago (Wednesday, July 26th).  We have been staying in the capital city, Reykjavik, but will be leaving here tomorrow by car for the Westfjords.  While here we have had several outings, some in the city, and one a bus tour of the south coast of the island.  We took Gray Line Tours, which offers an all-day tour of the coast east of the city.  We would go to see three famous and towering waterfalls and spend time on two black sand beaches.  If that sounds leisurely, which is what we expected, including, of course having someone else drive us, it was not.  What we didn’t realize is (a) the distances we would cover were more extensive than we’d thought, so much time was spent driving; (b) crowds were everywhere we stopped.  This meant that the lines for bathrooms were intimidating.  In one place where we stopped (where we were also supposed to buy lunch), there was a line of about 30 for the women’s room.  There were, for reasons unclear to us, 4 sinks, but only one stall.  Needless to say, it was that or lunch.  Lines for lunch also more impressive than I’d have liked.

At one of the waterfalls the guide said, well, we have 20 minutes here and then must leave.  So, if you walk really really fast and don’t go to the bathroom and don’t try to buy coffee, you might get halfway up the path to the waterfall.

At a famous and beautiful black sand beach, with also boasted pretty spectacular basalt cliffs, we were told we had 1/2 hour available.  So we rushed to the beach, then back to the bus which, meanwhile, had gotten stranded in the black sand mud just outside the parking area.  We were delayed there for an hour waiting for bus rescue.  At that point we were 1 1/2 hours out of Reykjavik, with farmlands and waterfalls between us and the city.  The driver tried to prevail upon another Gray Line tour bus driver to pull us out.  He declined.  Eventually a local farmer came by with a vehicle that could do the trick, and did.  We couldn’t go back to the beach while awaiting bus rescue, because we never knew when we’d have to be back on the bus.  So we stood around and watched the proceedings.  It was all kind of funny, except it was also kind of frustrating.

We stopped at another spectacular waterfall on the way back to the city.  This one had a path which went behind the waterfall, and we climbed up to do that.  Pretty fun though of course also pretty wet!

 

 

This past week i worked a bit at home on the shapes of the rocks in the small waterfalls.  Also repainted and tried to fix the big rocks.  Definitely a work in progress!  Today in class i wanted to play with the colors of the water at the bottom of the painting — the area that will be the focal point.  Teacher (Ed) suggested i just try working from the perimeter inward, starting with darks, moving to mid-tones and then having the bright spot in the center.  I spent most of the class on this assignment and feel like I’ve made some progress, but still need to do quite a bit to get it to “work” like i want it to.

In other news, i have dropped out of the “tracing” class.  I’ll give details maybe in my next post — but bottom line is that i realized from something that happened in my “regular” (Thursday) class a few weeks ago that there were probably irreconcilable differences between the two teachers’ approaches, and that i would be better off staying with my original class.

Anyhow, here’s photo of my work from the “calm water” painting.

in my “tracing” painting class last week i began a new project.  The reference photo for this one is of a set of waterfalls (“Copeland Falls) in Rocky Mountain National Park.  I took the photo in June.  We had a wet spring and the water was running very fast and i wanted to try to recapture some of the wildness and excitement of the water.  Yesterday was the first day of beginning this painting, as last week was devoted to making decisions about composition and doing the tracing and transferring to canvas. 

Last time i posted i included a reference photo for a new painting project.  This past week i have continued with adding layers to the underpainting and with beginning to add some details.  The reference photo for this project is from the trailhead to the Copeland Falls hike in Rocky Mountain National Park.  I took the photo when i was on a hike past the falls in June.  I’m using another photo from the same hike as a reference for my new project in my other painting class — and will post that one later today.