Mt. Rainier, 7:27 a.m.

12/4/20 Mt. Rainier from our bedroom window, 7:27 a.m.

By 7 a.m., the southern sky (the direction our house faces) starts to get a bit coral-pinkish around the edges. I had been up for a while, anticipating the sky’s color on this rare clear morning, but I was waiting for Greg to get up so that I could open the blinds on our bedroom’s French doors, which offer the best view of The Mountain. When he was finally out of bed, Her Majesty’s silhouette was clearly visible (less so in summer when the trees are leafed out). As wispy clouds the same dark blue as Rainier floated by, I sketched like a madwoman trying to capture the sky’s hues before they disappeared.

Less than an hour later, the clouds had turned white, and Rainier had disappeared behind her shroud of mist as she so often does after the sun comes up.

When drawing, I usually spend the most time thinking about how to render a three-dimensional form, since that’s one of my primary interests. (Every now and then, I still hear Suzanne Brooker’s voice in the drawing classes I took from her several years ago as she explained ways to avoid the dreaded appearance of “flat-flat-flatness” in landscapes.) Rainier’s silhouette was utterly flat in the near-darkness, almost like a paper cutout. I kept searching for clues of shadows, but there were none. I stopped searching and gave in to the flatness. This sketch was as much about the sky as the landscape.