Capturing the Elusive
Pam McCauley painting in her garden
Pam McCauley’s watercolor paintings of lighthouses and prints of boats and floats on display at the Martinez Gallery are suitable collector pieces for local sailors, fishermen and seafood restaurant owners wanting to enhance their homes and businesses with a nautical theme. Years of painting still life arrangements and attending life drawing sessions makes Pam a skillful draftswoman, able to work quickly, dashing in confident lines and swashes of color, to capture moods and fleeting moments.
Oxford Bay Dry Dock, watercolor
Take, for example, her prints of three gleaming white yachts dry docked at the Oxford Bay boat yard in Oregon. The prows of the yachts are marked out with two, well-placed cedar brown lines, squares of navy blue suggest the cabin windows, light grey washes puts one side of the yachts into shade while the other side of the boats is left white as untouched watercolor paper. The effect is marvelously simple. Minimalism and realism are combined with deftness, the resultant image being one a fisherman might see on his way down to the end of the pier, bucket of worms, tackle box and fishing rod in hand, catching a glimpse of the blindingly bright sunlight bouncing off the sides of the yachts into his eyes as he passes by them.
“I like to paint loosely, to catch an emotion that is being given off by the human or object,” said Pam.
Heceta Lighthouse, watercolor
Ghost Boatyard, watercolor
Her technique is fast, painting her immediate impressions, not laboring over the work and getting bogged down in details. Pam makes effective use of the transparency of the watercolor medium and surface textures to capture the most elusive elements of reality.
Enjoying the life of an artist to its fullest, Pam often times goes on plein air painting journeys with other painters, usually being the only watercolorist in the group. One of her recent trips was to the Point Montara Lighthouse in Montara, California. The print of floats is from that trip. At the lighthouse, Pam found differently colored and numbered floats tied to thick ropes scattered about the grounds and artfully arranged them into a tangled, still life heap. For a touch of added drama, the park ranger threw a fit when he saw what she had done (not to worry; for the sake of their art, artists endure these over reactions from the public all the time). Her painting of the floats is mind-engaging, an orderly composition of disorder. Another print on sale at the Martinez Gallery is of Lido boats resting upside down on wooden dry dock racks at the Balboa Island Yacht Club in the Newport area of southern California. The Lido boats are similarly painted in the solid colors of the floats described in the print above. The two prints would make a pleasing complementary pair hung side by side.
Pam appreciates the beauty in life. This is apparent from her art work. She believes everything is alive and has a particular influence, even inanimate objects.
“Surround yourself with objects that mean something to you. I think you have to be careful what you have around you,” Pam says.
Newport Coast, watercolor
Pam spends time relaxing in her home garden, away from it all, puttering amongst her flowers, which brings to mind her first painting experiment. When she was a little girl, she decided that the petals of a certain flower would look better painted a different color. She fetched her paint set and redecorated the petals, like a character in Alice in Wonderland working in the Queen of Hearts’s garden.
The watercolor painting titled Still Life and Landscape in One takes this same playful leap into an imaginary world filled with red apples as big as houses. A green striped dishcloth takes on the shape of sand dunes by the sea and cliffs by Point Montara Lighthouse on the coast of Oregon. Who knows what lines of thought Pam followed to arrive at this picture!
Pam would like to thank Casey Rasmussen White and Cathy Riggs for encouraging her as a professional artist in so many ways.
Pam McCauley became a member of the Martinez Gallery in 2010. She is a Lafayette resident. The gallery is located at 630 Court Street in downtown Martinez.
By Jen Copeland
Photograph by Julie Cheshire
mARTinez Gallery 