Quiet Waters, Part Three

QUIET WATERS 6- painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor and graphite on paper, August 201o

Quiet Waters, Part Two

QUIET WATERS 5, QUIET WATERS 4- paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown,

watercolor on paper, 2010

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My work this summer on the Quiet Waters paintings has been accompanied by the composition of this long-form soundscape piece for lap steel and laptop.

I invite you to listen and take a contemplative journey along the shoreline and on the water:

The Quiet Waters Series

QUIET WATERS 2, QUIET WATERS 1-Paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown,

watercolor on paper, 2010

This summer I'm working on a new series of paintings inspired by the contemplative energies I often find rising within me in at the places where water, sky, and land meet. Here are the first two. Making these images is an active meditation for me; a way to conjure the ineffable connection I feel with these places.

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(For information about purchasing prints and originals, or to enquire about my work and projects, please contact me at liminaleditions@gmail.com, or visit kevinmacneilbrown.wordpress.com )

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