A boat trip in Doubtful Sound was a great day for artist Pauline Bellamy, and an enduring inspiration.
This is a day of days for the Bellamy family: Manu, printmaker; Pauline, painter; Max, photographer; and John, going to Fiordland's Doubtful Sound for only a day, but what a work trip.
In the early morning, on an easy drive, anxious sunglasses reflect fast spray, cobalt washes and an excited feeling.
The drive to the bigger boat crawls under cliffs like raw umber brushstrokes, dripping sap-green mosses, fabulous orchids and long icicles.
It tickles distant storybook memories and dreams come crowding in with hairpin corners and runaway buses in snow. But all was calm in the sound.
Indigo cliffs that slip serenely into the same distance under water and tracks, remembered from tramps on which the watercolour paper may just get too wet, are this day relished from a dry deck with endless room to draw down the strokes appropriate to this plein-air paradise.
A floating easel unfolds. There are glimpses of Manu's drawing boards stuck up on anything that will hold them while he unconsciously moves charcoal over the paper like a graceful bird.
Max's moonlight directs itself carefully into his lens. John gently notices other corners for us to dive into.
The podocarp treeline and muddy shoreline take on another feel when you are not having to judge the weight of a pack, glasses slipping on a sweaty nose, supplejack twisting out and elbowing you sideways, getting your feet to a place where gravity and soft tree fell can change the plan in an instant.
I could now, for a day, revel in the majestic primal dark Paynes, grey-tinged images of timeless forest canopy, twice over, with the oily water blurring the edges, oily brushes saturating the moment, the ultimate in landscape painting and a best day when wrists and fingers are aching from drawing.
Remembering the miserable wet days in the bush on slippery trails, stumbling from tree marker to tree marker.
It's almost a joke to see it go by with so little effort and then turn around to a fabulous feed of salmon. What!The day has fed my canvas ever since and culminated in more physical trips to Fiordland, where the paper did get very wet and the water-soluble crayon just melted in my Japara pockets, unable to capture anything but sandflies and scroggin.
Pauline Bellamy is a Dunedin-based artist.
