The Beacon #1

by Lynne Wright

Title

The Beacon #1

Artist

Lynne Wright

Medium

Painting - Oil On Canvas

Description

This is (was) a 24x36 oil on canvas that I took a few liberties with, mostly on the jetty. My husband had taken pictures of it, but other than the lighthouse and the water, there wasn't a whole lot of it that I thought much of. Now right at this point in my tale, for hubby's sake, I'll put in that the problem wasn't with his picture taking, at least for the most part. There. Now I've said it and I can only hope he doesn't read this!
The taking on of this painting was a situation of firsts, and near firsts. In the near firsts department, I'd only been painting seascapes for a short while. In fact, I'd hardly been painting at all for a number of years. Raising a family has a really good way of putting one's other life on hold. I dearly love anything with a lighthouse, I dearly love painting, and I dearly loved not going insane in all the years before I took this sucker on.
Before I got up the nerve to paint a seascape, about the only water I'd ever painted was a gigantic puddle in front of an old, run down gas station. Now this was kind of a funny story in itself. I'll get back to the Beacon in just a minute. I just have a real need to tell the puddle in front of the gas station story.
I was working on a painting for the first time in many years, and had forgotten a lot of what I'd known at one point, and didn't have the common sense to check new things out before diving in. So I was working on this painting of an old gas station that I'd seen a picture of, and thought it was pretty cool. I got the building done, then decided that if this was going to be an active gas station, even if it was old as coon's age, maybe there ought to be a customer.
Some things have never come easy for me, and painting a realistic pick-up truck is one of them. That being the case, and me being the blonde that I am, I was going to paint that pick-up whether anybody liked it or not. As far as I know for sure, the only one that REALLY didn't like it was me. Dorky looking with a capital D.
So what do I do now? I had a pretty decent painting going on (in spite of myself) that had the unpleasant presence of the stupidest looking pick-up ever seen in the history of pick-up trucks taking up the whole middle of the canvas.

Now you'll remember I'd said something about occasionally not looking into something as deep as maybe I should have. I hated that truck, and was bound and determined to do something about it, and do something about NOW. I'd read about a drying agent called Copal, that I thought could be just what I was looking for. I mixed in bodacious amounts of the stuff with paint, then buried that pick-up under a nice big puddle. This old gas station was supposed to be in New Mexico somewhere, and NM isn't supposed to get a lot of rain, but that little spot in the world had just come through a monsoon!
Finally the day came that I decided it was done. We lived in a little town in southwest Kansas, and I was working at the local drug store. I took that painting to work, and hung it on the wall. I figured I spent more time at home than I did at work, so doing things this way, I wouldn't have to see it too much.
The drugstore where I worked had an old time soda fountain that was pretty popular with the regulars. One day a fellow I didn't know was sitting at the bar having a cup of coffee, and started telling me how much he liked that painting, and what would I take for it. Well, we weren't in that great of shape fiscally right then, as my husband Don had a bad back injury, and had to be off work for several months. This old boy was working away on his coffee, and still asking what I wanted for that painting. I didn't know much about pricing something like that, pretty much because I'd never sold anything. I figured it would be well over $100.00, but we needed the money, so I told him I'd take $100.00 for it, thinking he'd be getting a heck of a good deal.
Whew boy, did that start him unloading tales of woe. He didn't have much money, the farm wasn't going well, crops had failed, and his wife had dandruff for all I knew. So anyway, he hummed and hawed, and all but got on his knees before me, asking if there was any way possible I'd consider taking $75.00 for it. Any body that knows me will tell you I'm a sucker for a sob story, and always have been. No different now than it was 30 years ago when all this went down. I figured the $100.00 was a doggone well fair price, but it was easy to see that he would soon die of a broken heart if he didn't get that thing for $75.00. Okay then, $75.00 it is, even if I was seething under my breath.
This good old boy proceeds to take the $75 out of his pocket, paid his bill for coffee, grabbed the painting and took off for wherever he was taking off to.
I wasn't real happy about all this, but felt that probably the right thing had been done. It sure seemed like this guy needed some joy in his life, and if sacrificing that painting would give it to him, then so be it.
The ladies I worked with knew I wasn't too happy about things, and they knew why. They asked me if I knew who he was. Well, Don and I stayed home a lot, and didn't know too many people, and no, I didn't know who he was. Well folks, turns out that sucker suckered a sucker big time. Seems as though this jerk was one of the biggest farmer/ranchers in the county, and had so much money it would take him a year to count it all.
I was mad. Really, really mad! As all things fell together, I kind of think the loser in this story was him, by golly, and in more ways than one.
You'll remember me using the Copal dryer. I mixed up the biggest load of that stuff you could ever imagine, 'cause I wanted that pick-up dry enough to paint over in very short order. As I remember, it was several years later that I finished reading what the book had to say about Copal dryer. It seems as though it is supposed to be used sparingly, because used in too great amounts, it would crack and peel the paint really pretty seriously.
For a good long time now, I've just eaten up the idea of that old pick-up slowly emerging from the muck of that Copal mud puddle, and it's one of those stories that are just fun to remember and share with folks. As a fact, things do come around every so often.
I imagine by now you could really care less about what this is all supposedly to be about, namely the painting of Point Arenas. I'll cut it short. I promise.
As said earlier, I hadn't been painting seascapes long, and for doggone sure had never tried anything as big as a 24x36. I was scared to death I hardly knew how to do water, I'd never really done rocks, and I really worked on that sky. All of the water from the beach to the breaker, was done with a brush that was really, really small, and it took me months to finish the thing.
Years after doing this, Don and I had a small gallery in the mountains of northeastern Oregon, and The Beacon was one of the paintings hanging there. One day a couple came in and liked it a lot. It turned out they were from the New Orleans area, and had just spent a week or so on the Oregon coast, going through gallery after gallery looking at seascapes. Evidently they'd never found anything that really did it for them, so didn't get anything. They show up at our place, as far as you could get from the coast, in the mountains of the most northeast county in the state of Oregon.
Strange as it was, God blessed us that day. Not only did this couple by The Beacon, but another painting as well.
Like folks say, it does come around.