Middle Raccoon

My residency at Whiterock ended last weekend, and properly so if you factor in the weather. The first ten days were simply glorious--warm, sunny, not very windy--and the landscape just raged with color. The yellows, golds, rusts, glowing scarlets and more were astonishing. While trying to capture those colors my mind kept repeating that no one would believe it if paint could capture their intensity (it can't). 

Durng the residency much of my time was observation and sketching, my attempts to fix things in my visual library. Watercolor sketching is quite useful for that. 

The Middle Raccoon River runs through it, shallow but strong despite our current drought conditions. The foliage colors below the white rock bluff were incredibly varied, and for that matter, so were the water's reflections.