Canoeing the Duck

Scored a canoe and Jason Saunders and I went canoeing on the upper end of the Duck River. We floated a stretch from Dement Bridge to Three Forks Bridge in Bedford County. It was an easy float that was short enough to allow a few attempts at painting. The hardest part was the actual painting. The river does not give up its paintings easily. It is incredibly hard painting. There is so much out there. Dappled light, water and all that goes with that, rocks, etc., etc. There are so many different shapes and values and I won't even go into the compositional issues. I tried twice to paint sunlit grassbeds and twice made a miserable mess. I could not get that wonderful illumination. There was a color and intensity there that I could only get close to without ever making it work. I think in the last blog I mentioned pushing the values up hoping that would do it but again it wasn't the answer to the problem.
The only tight moment we had was when I, as navigator, missed a submerged stump and we centered it. The canoe stuck and rocked a bit. We tried to get off the stump with paddles but ultimately started rocking in unison and slid it off. After you do something like that there is always a bit of paranoia that someone saw it or worse, videoed it.