For the Love of the Lake

He hangs out a lot at Harveys Lake. He loves to fish and owns a boat or two. He is a beloved father and grandfather, married for 52 years to one of my talented artist friends. Because he lives with an artist, he knows the importance of color, contrast and visual texture. He snaps cell phone photos and texts his trophy shots to a very small, select group of people. He not only enjoys sunsets—Sam Giunta STALKS sunsets! Sam is an opacarophile, a person who loves sunsets and their seemingly magical transition from day into night. That word comes from opacare, Latin for dusk or sunset, and phile, Greek for love.

I am blessed to be in his select group of sunset photo recipients. With Sam’s blessings, I have set out on a new artistic journey! Long ago, I recognized my own personal need for goal setting. Thus, one of my current goals is to transform a minimum of 100 of Sam’s photos into small acrylic paintings, showcasing the lake that many of us here InSide the Back Mountain call our favorite! Harveys Lake’s history, recreational opportunities, and wonderful people are well known. Sam and I would like to make it recognized for its magnificent sunsets, rivaling those vast skyscapes seen from the vantage point of the Wyoming Valley Mall! 

Sam’s beautiful wife, Renee, and I have shared many wonderful experiences, including one of the most unique and exciting sunset hot air balloon rides I have ever flown… but I digress! Months ago, when Renee showed me a few of Sam’s Harveys Lake sunset photos, I gasped and immediately asked if Sam would mind if I painted from a few of them. Sam added my name to his select photo group and within days there were a growing number of gorgeous sunset reference photos in my “Sam Giunta” phone album. That's when I set my goal of at least 100 small acrylic paintings, all the same size, 4 inches high and 6 inches wide.

Some are painted on canvas panels. Others are painted on gessoed ragboard to provide a smooth surface allowing a bit of extra detail since the bumpy texture of the canvas panel is sometimes a hindrance. Bumps are especially challenging when the painting surface is only 4 inches high and 6 inches wide! Many have asked why I chose the medium of acrylic, not watercolor or oil—and why did I choose such a small size? I chose acrylic paint which is a polymer, basically a liquid plastic, because tube colors are vibrant, luminous, and capable of the multiple glazes needed to depict realistic skies with many cloud layers. The small size was simply a practical decision. Even these “Harveys Lake Littles” take me 8 to 12 hours each, depending on the complexity of sky formations and water reflections. Larger sizes would significantly increase the time required for each painting and reduce the number of sunsets I could explore!

As an artist with decades of experience behind me, I still love learning. I am a huge fan of James Gurney, the greatly admired artist who created Dinotopia. In 1982, I bought the book written by Gurney and his friend Thomas Kinkaid, who later became famous as the “Painter of Light.” Both were art school dropouts who became wildly successful in the field of art! For decades I have taught the principles in their book, The Artist’s Guide to Sketching, which they wrote while bumming/hitching their way across the United States. Today it’s  considered a classic!  In one of Gurney’s recent writings, he expounded on the usefulness to the serious painter of abandoning the commonly accepted  red-yellow-blue primaries taught in art schools everywhere for color mixing, replacing them with the printing industry's cyan-magenta-yellow, and adding the stage and screen primaries of red-green-blue. So I decided to use them to paint these Harveys Lake scenes. For anyone interested, there’s a plethora of information available about the subtractive color system of CMYK and the additive system of RGB… it's too much info for this little article! Suffice it to say, I dropped the K which stands for Key color, or Black, because I don't paint with black. By mixing RGB with CMY, I can achieve the best darks, plus all these other hues you see in these paintings and have a blast doing it!

There's also an entire science to sunsets, their colors, the cloud formations, angles of the setting sun, and other variables. Opacarophiles like Sam Giunta simply love the beauty of sunsets. Painters like me echo that thought! Care to join us?

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This article originally appeared in the February 2026 publication of InSide the Back Mountain.