Morning Light at Hilo Bay

 

The Origin of the print 'Morning Light at Hilo Bay'

How does one affix a moment when an idea starts, as that idea will have other ideas which preceded it and loosened the soil for the seed to find an agreeable bed to start its life in? The seed is the origin of the tree, but another tree was the origin of the seed.

So to affix a particular time when the idea for Hilo Bay occurred to me is simply to make a guess at what I was doing when I thought to start the design.

I was already at work on my series of Hawaiian scenes in the pen and ink-color pencil stage, and looking for new views. From the time I spent living in Hawaii, my travels, hiking and camping about, photographs I had taken, impressions left in my imagination, the colors I used to see, and still do, when I am lying on a beach and crack an eye just a sliver to start colors moving like lava in my imagination; all this was the background of my search, in addition to photographic reference material I might have accumulated on my bookshelf.

With my memories of Hilo and its bay, Liliuokalani Park, kids crabbing at first light off the little moon bridge in the lagoon, the lane of banyan trees with their aerial roots swaying in the breeze, a hotel pond of Koi just stirring, a cool and crisp early dawn before the town awoke; I wanted to get some of that in my design.

From a color slide I must have somewhere, the design was started in 1991 or 1992. I designed the essential composition in a pen drawing. When you come to the color of a print, this is when you must settle a time of day, and of course dawn at Hilo Bay was what I wanted to remember in the print, so I set about finding the colors to do this. At first it was with color pencil, and looking back at those early drawings now, I must say that the greater part of the atmosphere of that design was still in my head. Only a few years later, when I started exploring the use of a computer to paint, did I more completely achieve the atmosphere of that design that I had been after.

After a creative evolution, this design is what emerged, and this most illustrates the image of Hilo Bay that I still have in mind. When I say 'creative evolution', what I mean is this: whenever I do a print, I only step away from it when it gives me a good feeling. I may come back in an hour, or a week, or a few months to catch it with a fresh eye, just to see if it still gives me the feeling I want it to. If not, I explore different colors, and of course when you start playing with color, the entire composition must very often be re-tuned. One color suddenly changes the emphasis, perhaps beneficially, perhaps not, but often you can start to see another atmosphere emerging, and you follow it out until you achieve a crystallization of the image you have in mind. It is a constant evolution until you finally come up with no other way to improve it. There you leave it for your repeated enjoyment.

I believe 'Hilo Bay' is at that point now for me, with the possible exception of seeing it as a woodblock print. There is still some added magic to the scene which Dave may be able to coax out of it with his woodblock printing materials and skill, and it is my enthusiastic hope that he does, so others may see the Hilo Bay I once saw, and perhaps are left with the same happy sigh of discovery.

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