Big Ideas

 Praia de Marinha is described as the incredibly photogenic beach that attracts a huge crowd in the summer.  In fact, there's a sign at the entrance to the stairs to the beach with a green light for "not crowded," yellow for "pretty crowded" and red for "overcrowded, don't go."  And on a cloudy but warm winter day, that lone set of footprints in the sand are mine.

The walk along the cliffs above the beach is spectacular and seeing the fragility of the rock formations, the seemingly impossible balance of a huge rock on a narrow little base and hearing water rush in to a cave below your feet you get the sense that this is both solid (it's rock!) and ... could at any minute be forced by the sea, the wind or gravity into a new configuration.  It's also vast.

Which is where yesterday's big ideas came in.  Before I get to that, just a little. more context.  After my morning hike on these cliffs and beach, I went to a real grocery store. Not a little market, but a big gourmet supermarket kind of store.  There was the amazing produce and variety of food I'd been looking for!  And it isn't more than 10 minutes from my place, I just had to decide to go 10 minutes away instead of 5.  Silly.  Also silly, I bought a UK House and Garden magazine, which I thoroughly enjoyed while eating a salad I made from the grocery store purchases.  And right in the table of contents, there was "Bradley Palmer sets out napkins and napkin rings."  This issue was promoted on the cover as New Beginnings.  And yet, napkins and napkin rings.  There were many transformations of homes (but why, no "before" pictures?), so they weren't misrepresenting the contents.

So here's where I come in.  I am in Portugal to see and paint things I've never seen before.  To think outside the known and into the realm of whatever is possible while my mind wanders.   And there I was on a vast, empty beach surrounded by huge cliffs and rocks... and doing painting studies that were the size and equivalent of napkins and napkin rings.  

Not that there isn't a place for those things, but I think I also need to capture the vastness of what I'm seeing and maybe need to do that by working big.  A diptych? triptych? How about taking the nine 20 x 24 canvases I prepared back home and putting them all into one larger work?  I'm not going to be able to do the big work while I'm here but I can plan for it.  So next up, studies from my studies to plan for larger work of the cliffs and beaches.

And, for a change of pace, here's the sky at sunrise today.