THE OXBOW INN, SAUGATUCK, MICHIGAN

Oxbow Inn, Saugatuck, Michigan, 29 x 40 inch oil and pencil on paper painting by George C. Clark   AVAILABLE

Oxbow 1946, photo by Life Magazine photographer Loomis Dean

I painted the Oxbow Inn on-site in the 1980s while attending a week-long workshop at the Summer School of Art there conducted there by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  It is the original structure of the famous art colony, having been constructed in the 19th century to house lumberjacks harvesting Michigan's old-growth forests.  It is now the headquarters of the school with student housing upstairs and gallery and lounge space and the kitchen downstairs.  Meals are eaten on the big verandas that surround part of the building.  There are a number of newer outbuildings that house studios and workspaces for various media, but I found the Inn the most interesting to paint.

The morning I started this painting was overcast, with the sky dark and threatening rain.  Most artists show the front of the building, where a wide veranda faces a lawn leading down to Oxbow Lagoon.  I preferred to paint the side of the building where I could show the white structure with a big dark forested dune looming over it, so I set up by the road where the cars are parked in the photo.  I liked the details in the foreground-- the propane canisters, the garbage cans, and especially the yellow duck whirly-gig.  While I was working, one of the kitchen workers came out to take a break, so I painted her in, too.  This is a case where a painting can be truer than a photograph.  To get a camera back far enough to include this whole facade you would have to tear down a couple of outbuildings and a bunch of trees.  

I found the 1946 photo online.  The truck is parked down by the shore of the Lagoon.  We painted models outdoors too, but mostly in a garden adjacent to the Inn.  The dune in the upper right of the photo is the one in the background of my painting.