Waiting With the Boats

The tide is out and the boats sit low against the quay, patient as animals. I tape the paper to the board, pour the water, and wait with them. There is a full hour before the light will do what I want it to do, and the waiting is not separate from the painting. It is the first wash.

When the sun finally thins the fog, one hull turns a blue that has no business being so loud among all the working browns and whites. I mix cornflower with a little of the morning's gray and lay it in wet, and the paper takes it the way sand takes a wave.

What the water decided

A backrun blooms along the waterline while I am looking at the nets. I leave it. The chalky halo it makes is truer to how harbor water holds light than anything I could have planned.

By the time the tide turns, the sheet is finished, or close enough that more brushwork would be a kind of vanity. I carry it home flat across my arms like bread from the bakery.