Fowler Duneshack photo © Chris Seufert
Last spring I won the lottery! Not cash, but the annual lottery run by the National Seashore for a stay in one of the historic artist duneshacks near Provincetown. It was an amazing week - just me and the coyotes - and I fell back in love with watercolor painting, my first love. Because it was cool and, at times rainy, I spent a lot of time in the shack painting the dunes in each direction. What caught my eye, and my heart, was the swirl and sweep of sand and sky, and I found that painting on the polypropylene surface of Yupo, rather than a more traditional cotton rag watercolor paper, allowed me to capture this movement. My summer adventure continued with travels around Alaska in August, and there I painted the volcanoes of the Kenai peninsula and the tundra of Denali using the same media. Although the palette was different from the Outer Cape, I was drawn to the same sense of flow caused by geological processes. And, as I did with the Cape Cod series, I let the properties of the materials -- watercolor rolling around the plastic-like paper until it evaporates -- guide the work, and recreate the lyrical shapes I found on the edges of America.
