Painting of Lexington Reservoir
Last week I scrambled down to an inlet of the Lexington Reservoir near Los Gatos with my friend Vernon and we painted a little. We were looking for some ambient water. It was so hot and sunny that we had to go up into a shady gully to one side. We saw some egrets landing. I’ve gone back to the picture four times, and I think it’s done now.
I had to focus down on just part of the scene to get a picture. The two things I liked best were the wavy shoreline and the cracked mud.
I always think of math when I see things like this…
August 31st, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Yeah, those mud-crack polygons are a serious computation… but of what?
August 31st, 2007 at 5:09 pm
What gets to me are all those horizontal sediment layers. So many… one per year over years and years and years and years…
Once I visited the Grand Canyon, saw similar striations, and realized that it was too much for me to see. Too complex; my input stack overflowed. The canyon defeated my brain.
September 1st, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Have you read the Betty Edwards book “Drawing on the Right-Side of the Brain”? It’s very interesting from a science angle, and it helped me improve my drawing skills!
September 2nd, 2007 at 8:15 am
Ooh, the water is getting low…any sign of the village yet? A few years back I read about the road and small settlement that used to exist there.
September 2nd, 2007 at 10:59 am
Bradley, the water’s actually relatively high right now. This is nothing like the seven-year drought of the late 1980s.
Every now and then the water statraps drain the reservoir dry to re-engineer the run-off drains, which never seem to get fully fixed, seems like some kind of public works scam.
I have in fact seen that drowned village Lexington (the Atlantis of Los Gatos), pretty much all that’s there now is an old concrete brdige.
September 14th, 2007 at 10:06 am
This picture reminds me the Giants Causeway in Northern Ireland:
http://simonward.com/wallpaper/causeway.jpg
It’s a large natural area of about 40000 interlocking basalt columns resulting from a volcanic eruption.
I’ve seen them this summer during my irish holidays and these rocks are amazing!