Watercolor - Lake Sebago, Maine

"Boats on Shingle Cove Beach - Lake Sebago, Maine" (14"X11", Watercolor, $150)

I've only done one oil painting of my trips to Maine, which I focused on in the previous post, but I've done a few watercolors on-site while relaxing in the afternoon. It's all part of the laid-back agenda that makes a week at Lake Sebago in the summer so wonderful for me.

This picture was made while sitting in a beach chair on a little spit of sand adjacent from the sandy beach and across from the four cabins that make up the whole cove. The cabin that Tina and I have stayed in fir the past nine years is the one on the left, cabin three. The screened-in porch mentioned before is visible on the right of the building, while the tall crank-out windows all along the front cast long shadows on the facade as the sun angles in the sky. The hammock trees are in front of the cabin, to the right, and you get a sense of the pine-style canopy over the whole area from this painting. The next cabin over is bigger, but we prefer to stay in the little one, right at the edge of the beach.

The sailboats belong to a family that used to always coordinate their visits with ours, but have gotten other places to stay lately. The limp sail of the boat in back hides the BBQ pit on the little grassy rise behind, while the blue boat with the taut sail is about to be launched for an afternoon idyll on the lake. The water is very flat and calm, and the sandy bottom is seen through the clear water. It will be a little to tough to get the boat out onto the main lake, but there's a fair amount of wind outside the cove to push the solitary sailor along.

The silence and stillness of the campground is palpable in this picture, as is the brightness of the sun once it's gotten past the heat of the day. Tina is probably reading in the hammock or making a shrimp roll-up to snack on. Meanwhile, I'm having a glass of wine and snacking on peanuts (as I recall) in between focusing my mind and paintbrush on the paper. What's not to love about that kind of agenda?