Tuesday, 02-Aug-11 21:05:00 CEST

Storån outside Svanaholm at the north side of lake Bolmen in Sweden

At the weather forecast I had heard that cumulus clouds were predicted for today. I really like cumulus clouds. They are little sculptures. I also like meandering rivers. So here I tried to combine the two; the meandering river Storån today when the sky was displaying stunning cumulus clouds. It is not so difficult to like nice weather.

I grabbed one of the panels I made earlier and went to Storån. I parked the car next to a sign telling me that fishing is prohibited unless you have a fishing license. I was curious when I unpacked the car if I would be taken for a fisher and get a checkup.

On this painting I used retarder. I had planned to make an opaque acrylic painting but I had to try a bit of retarder and the panel worked nicely with retarder, almost too nice. I kept spraying and spraying and could not really get to the opaque part.

After a while a farmer came driving on the road. I had parked at the side of the road and I was worried that there would be no room for both my car and the tractor and the harvester behind the tractor. The driver made an elegant bow around my car and disappeared in a dusty cloud at the horizon as if this was a really simple maneuver.

Then I continued with my painting. It was warm, really warm. After a while I hear someone arrive by bike. I guess that the farmer had called the local fish license checkup authority. To my surprise I knew the person who arrived. Her name was Anita. I had rented a “Stuga” from Anita and her husband Göran a couple of years ago. I was not sure but maybe I had parked on her land. If that was the case the farmer could have been her son. She was double surprised because she did not know that I was a painter and she had expected that I would be fishing. I could not figure out if she got a tip from her son ;-)

We talked for a while about painting in general and it turned out she don’t do any art paintings herself except she was about to paint her house tomorrow. Anita biked away and I think she biked all the way to the lake Bolmen and then returned back. The next time I had progressed my painting a bit further. At that moment I was not pleased with my progress. I joked about that maybe I had “taken water over my head”. We talked for a while again and then she continued her journey on her bike. When she left it the painting work got into a productive flow.

Next time I work on cumulus clouds I will give these more space.

On Friday the 5th of August I decided that I will take a thinner paint brush and paint more variations in the leaves of the forest in this painting. Also the tree trunks need to be thinner. I will come back with more on this later, stay tuned!