June Sails, Juniper Island

When I engage with Lake Champlain's waters, sky, and shoreline, I often feel, all at once, both a deep inner calm and a vibrant sense of energy. My intent in this painting was to express these sensations: the wide and deep spaciousness of the lakescape; the movement and energy of light on water, wind in sails.

-KMB

Early Summer, Lake Champlain

EARLY SUMMER, LAKE CHAMPLAIN- painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor and graphite on paper, May, 2010)

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...I’m grateful and awed every time I engage with Lake Champlain; with its ever-changing surface, shores, and depths offering knowledge and mystery alike.
-KMB, from "Power of Place"

You can read the entire short essay at :

http://voicesforthelake.org/items/show/4

From the Cove

(From the Cove, Lake Champlain,

Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper, 2010 )

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From the Cove, Lake Champlain

My father left
this cove in,
what was it,
1833?

Now I’m here again,
three decades on,

seeing the lake through his eyes:

Water always
in motion;
though also, at times,
becalmed.

He had spoken more than
once of season’s changing,
bringing a rain of
birds across the
sky and on the water.

He had also said to me:
“Look at all
that deep blue lake;
those distant ghost-grey mountains today;
the dark green forest sharp to the sky --
but sweet silver shallows
at home here
at the cove…”

This was the place
he always
struck out from,
every morning,
year after year.

As I write these words
a fish-hawk swoops,
hits the water hard,
rises
with gleam of
catch in talons.

So, something
still here
of my father, then,
meeting my return.

-Kevin Macneil Brown

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Among the many resonances I experience in the presence of Lake Champlain are those that vibrate with a sense of the past. When I finished the painting above in April, I knew there was a story that went with it, but I was not sure exactly what it was. I did have a sense that there was something sort of 19th century about the image.

I returned to the lake shore along Burlington Bay recently for a day of walking, thinking, sketching--experiencing the lake and its horizons as fully as I could. I was riding the bus home when the poem arrived, and I got the first draft down, knowing that I'd found the story to go with the painting.

Across April

LAKE CHAMPLAIN APRIL II, I
Paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor on paper, 2010

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A whole day
in one place:

the edge of
red quartzite
cliffs,

and from here
I can watch
the changing weather
coming for miles.


There it is!
A thin bright line,
slow-moving, silver
across the broad lake, the
flint-hard, sky-flecked waves.


-Kevin Macneil Brown
April, 2010

From Oakledge, April

FROM OAKLEDGE - Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,

watercolor on paper, 2010

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April, and darkness falls at Oakledge.

And out across the water of sky, the sky of water, one last
glint of daylight finds the island,
then is taken in to the heart of dark spruce and shadowed pine.

It’s these vibrations and striations
in time and light that
I live for here at the lakeshore.

For instance, right now,
when lost soundings in fathoms return to memory,
and old bridge footings rise again.

As for me, like these ancient red rocks,
I only seem to be still.

And what first arrives as twilight quiet
is soon to come alive

with wing-beat, ripple, wave on shifting stone.

-Kevin Macneil Brown

Spring Passage

SPRING PASSAGE (detail) Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
acrylic on canvas, 2010

Lake Champlain, Early Spring Evening

Lake Champlain, Early Spring Evening (detail)
Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
acrylic on canvas, 2010