Young Squirrels

The Viewpoint was full of young gray squirrels this afternoon. I counted six, all foraging for nuts. They were on the small side and obviously born this year. Two middle-aged women came jogging through--one in black pants and a purple top and the other all in black. The squirrels scampered up the trees and hid there till the women were gone. The bay was very calm, and on the surface of the water there was a beautiful, soft reflection of the trees on the north shore. I set up my tripod and took one photo. There was another photographer, a man taking photos with a point-and-shoot just as I arrived, but I'm afraid I scared him off because I was carrying a tripod. There's something about a tripod that makes a photographer look serious. People sort of get out of the way when you come along, assuming you're going to set the tripod up, and when it's already set up, they're often careful not to walk directly in front of you or even to come anywhere near you. I'd love to do a painting of the Viewpoint with squirrels in it, but they would be hard to incorporate in a scene painting since they're so small in relation to the total amount of space. If a leaf is represented by a casual brushstroke, and a squirrel isn't much larger than a leaf (and in some cases is smaller), that means the squirrel can be nothing but a dab of paint. The other options would be to do a painting focusing on a squirrel or two, but then you wouldn't see much of the view, I'm afraid. Or you could do a painting with the view and then one or more vignettes with close-ups of squirrels. I saw a show of landscape paintings with vignettes of species about ten or fifteen years ago. There was something sort of pedantic about it. I'll have to think about this further. Incidentally, it seems to me that when I was a child, there were more red squirrels around. I haven't seen one in years--just gray.