Although many of my paintings of Little Qualicum Falls on Vancouver Island tried to capture three pools, each one different, I was also fascinated by the ‘sunlit rocks like crumpled aluminum foil’ as I wrote in my sketch book in September ’94.
I was there again at the same time of year in 2017, but the surrounding rocks looked quite different from what I remembered. Maybe it was the light? At any rate my camera has this ‘creative’ button on the dial that churns out five mostly bad images but this highly posterized one actually makes the rocks look like crumpled foil. 
A painting of the wrinkled rocks along with the turquoise water and surrounding forest. (30″ x 22″, 36″ x 28″ framed; mixed-media on paper)
A sunlit pool with the intense blue-green water rippling around a large rock that goes way down.
Impressionistic painting of the above rock and sunlit water. (12″ x 16″, mixed-media on wood panel)
23 years later and various log jams have changed the course of the water, causing the waterfall at the side of the three pools to disappear. I have run this image through the photo app Sketch Guru Gouache.
In the painting inspired by the above image I painted the rocks with flat sandy acrylic, and the water with shiny translucent colour (18″ x 24″, mixed-media on wood panel)
One of the star attractions of Little Qualicum Falls on Vancouver Island was the three pools, each one different: one a sun-lit deep sea green, one a ‘black pool’ and the last a ‘shallow pool, clear’ with blue and ochre stones in the bottom.
Batz Gallery 
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