Thursday, November 20, 2008

Making Art While Snorkeling

It's tough to make beads, stitch quilts or work with metal clay while immersed in the Caribbean Sea. Grand Cayman is a very laid back place that can suck the motivation out of you to do much of anything but lay face down in an azure infinity watching gayly colored fish curiously inspect your fish identification book. 


The best I could do was to try to hold to my notion of at least one doodle per day, in quest of material for tear-away textures. 

I did make a quick sketch of a rooster. Evidently, in Hurricane Ivan many chickens regained the species' lost freedom, and they have prospered in the wild. I bought a small watercolor of a rooster to commemorate the trip. The gallery owner alerted me to watching for wild chickens in front of the islands' two Kentucky Fried Chicken shops. Despite numerous passes with my camera handy, I never caught that irony in person.


The most involved work I made was a watercolored drawing of a catamaran beached near my lounge chair.

For art supplies, I packed a set of different line width markers, a watercolor pencil set and water reservoir brush, and a stack of precut 4" square card stock. I took watercolor postcards, but never used them.