The rice field by Kashima shrine at noon. Documenting with care.

It was only meant to be a few days away from this other mixed media painting, weeks at most. Yet, here we are on the first week of April and the Kashima shrine painting is still not complete. For a while I simply found it hard to paint a landscape set in Noto. Does this place still look anything like the photograph in the aftermath of the earthquake? How will someone from the area react if they come across it – looking upon someone else’s memory of the place they call home? Can loss and quiet solitude be reconciled positively?

All the questions continued to swirl in my mind until I wrote about such feelings early in the year. Your comments encouraged me to simply keep painting that calm and beauty.

I started piecing together compositions like I always do when I cannot paint on site. Closing my eyes and thinking back to the moment in the photo above of Kashima shrine. A brief stop near the side of the road, the sun high up in the sky shortly after noon. Hot, a clear hot day and near perfectly still air. Which was why the reflection on the rice paddy of the shrine was so clear.

Row after row of young rice plants rising above the water in a yellow green speckled field, the land an ochre-brown color. The dark green patch of woods enclosing the shrine beyond, Nanao bay in the distance. And not a bird, nor person in sight. Where were they?