Art Chowder July | August 2017, Issue 10 | Page 27

E M I LY G W I N N
By Karen Mobley
How To Paint A River
For Melissa Cole and Marshall Peterson at the Marmot Art Space Opening March 6, 2015
“Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot;
others transform a yellow spot into the sun.”
- Pablo Picasso
In May of 2014 the Colorado River kissed
the Sea of Cortez for the first time
in 16 years –
a tongue dipped into brine
like a sable brush sinking into
a cerulean harbor.
It is the painter’s job to prove
the sky’s reflection on water’s
palette is a deeper version of sky.
This is how longing tastes.
Like 16 years and azure mixed with cadmium
and cornflower,
gently pushed into canvas,
a mixing zone of cool,
brackish sluice.
How long it had waited,
wanted, from the Rockies
through cataract and dam:
Fontenelle, Flaming Gorge, Glen Canyon, and Hoover,
finally pressing into tributaries,
into impasto: thick lines kneaded into tides
of feldspar and slate.
It is the painter’s job to witness
to evince that each scale
of red snapper exists,
in scumbled drybrush,
waterfall marks and grass lines,
it is her job
to lead each river
back into tidal pools and strokes,
to turn acrylic
into collection
of desert pupfish,
Colorado delta clam,
and vaquita.
It is the painter’s job to paint
not what she remembers –
but what she cannot
forget:
how water can greet an empty channel –
push itself onto dry canvas,
how it can stretch over 1500 miles into sea,
into estuary,
calling watershed
by a new name,
guiding its headwaters finally
home.
Photo Credit: Don and Julia Photography
July | August 2017 27