Gloucester, Mass - Bass Rocks

"Cloudy Day on Bass Rocks - Gloucester, Mass" (12"X16", Oil on Canvas, $450)

I did this one on-site, as it was part of the same NSAA plein-air painting course that was mentioned in the previous post. I was positioned high up on Bass Rocks with the rest of the painting group and chose to face the point of the coast where the old hotel is built. The lawn in front of the hotel used to have a pool, until the blizzard of '78 threw loads of huge stones over the seawall which landed in the pool, cracking at the bottom. They filled it in and landscaped it after that, placing some of the huge stones on the lawn. The gazebo on the left had to be completely re-built, too. All smashed up.

In this painting, the waves slosh around the guano-covered rocks where the seabirds rest, and splash up all along the seawall. The stone-covered beach, just visible on the right, is beaten by long arcs of waves, seen coming in one after the other. The curves of the waves and the curved coastline add motion to the painting, and the big rocks near where I was painting add a foreground element. The sky, being a sort of lilac purple, was unnaturally pretty, but combined with the wind and waves, foreboding nonetheless. It said that rain was on the way, maybe a bad storm. It did rain hard that night and through the next day, which spoiled the plein-air aspect of the painting group, but the last day of my long weekend was when I painted the sunny picture of my mother's porch from the back yard that's in the previous post.