Landscapes of Hawaiʻi

Last week a former co-worker of mine from when I was working for ASIAA with the Yuan-Tseh Lee Array put up a video he'd taken with a drone showing some of the landscape around the Saddle region of the island of Hawaiʻi and the area around the YTLA. It's absolutely fantastic, and I highly recommend you watch it below:

Seeing these landscapes I know and love from a perspective at once familiar and alien was really quite a powerful experience for me. The first ~1:10 of the video shows the Saddle region between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, and the Mauna Loa access road splitting off from Saddle Road near Puʻu Huluhulu (which I've written about before). I know this road like the back of my hand from driving it so often last year, and seeing it from a bird's eye view—being able to see all the different lava flows of which you can form but such an imperfect and fragmentary picture from the ground—was incredibly thrilling. In some ways, though, it wasn't entirely alien, because from up on the slopes on Mauna Loa we could always look back and see down to Puʻu Huluhulu and where the road connected; we just couldn't see it this closely. Thus the interesting sensation of seeing something familiar from an unfamiliar angle.

Apparently the experience of seeing my favorite volcanoes again affected me more powerfully than I thought, because last Friday at lunch when I noticed that the whiteboard in the lunch room was uncharacteristically clean I found myself with a vision of the island in my head and a powerful compulsion to draw it out, which led to me creating this:

Hawaiʻi island from the north, maybe ~5–6,000 meters up. I ran out of room to show Kohala at the bottom.

I've been thinking, now that I've finished with my YTLA model, of taking up painting as a way of de-stressing. I enjoyed painting my model quite a bit, and feel like it'd be nice to leave out the model-making and just focus on the painting. I'd like to do landscapes, in a sort of extension of my love of panoramas. I've had a picture in my head that I've wanted to create since something like 2012, similar to this one though more focused (and a night scene), and I'm looking forward to finally working it out.

We may even be able restart the weekly art workshops we had for the first few months of the year! Both Pam and Carolyn (our art mentors) and several other students are quite enthusiastic about the idea, so we shall see. A hui hou!