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Famed for nightly manta viewings, Keauhou Bay on Hawaii Island’s Kona side also provides an eye-catching panorama by day, especially when sleek outrigger canoes in crayon hues slice through its deep blue waters lined by stark black lava. It’s a vision champion paddler and renowned artist Mike Field knows well, and the inspiration for several artworks on display in the newly renovated OUTRIGGER Kona Resort & Spa overlooking the bay.
In one of Field’s graphic-style canvases hanging in the resort’s redesigned Voyager 47 Club Lounge, for example, a silhouette of a paddler in a one-person outrigger heads past black cliffs and palm trees toward a puffy white clouds on a yellow horizon, with a fainter image of canoe and paddler reflected in the light turquoise water.
“There’s a late afternoon light that comes into Keauhou Bay where I’ve practiced and paddled for the last 25 years,” Field notes. “One glary afternoon, I just saw the beauty—the reflection of the canoes, how sharp and gritty it was, the juxtaposition between the cool tranquil water and the jagged, harsh, gnarly lava there. That’s a neat thing to play off there, with the reflection of the paddler, and I wanted to make it as simple as possible but at the same time evoke a message.”
Another of Field’s images graces the resort’s custom-designed, Raw Elements reef-safe sunscreen stations, in this case with a six-person outrigger canoe heading out of the bay under a yellow and peach sky. While some of the bold colors come from purely artistic impulses, Field took special care with the position of the paddlers’ strokes.
“Late afternoon, when everyone is practicing in Keauhou Bay, the sun sets right in that bay—it’s such an insane place for a canoe club,” Field says. Growing up on Oahu, “my life was all about coaching and paddling and competing and learning, so it was fitting for me to always draw paddlers and their form.”
Calling himself a “stickler for precision,” he adds, “I would draw the proper stroke so I could explain to my team or my own kids synchronicity—the most important thing is that you all strike at the same time and you all exit at the same time. I would pull out what the angle of what the first paddler was and do that for the next guy and the next guy, so that one person wasn’t already finished with the stroke when the other wasn’t.” Showing the paddlers working together in unison underlines the adage “You’re only as strong as your weakest link,” Field says, a concept that dovetails with the Hawaiian values of unity and cooperation.
Helping OUTRIGGER promote the use of reef-safe sunscreen also resonates with Field. “My kuleana (responsibility) is the water,” he explains. “It wouldn’t be right if I littered or I did things in the water that I would be upset if other people did. You want to use the best things you can and use the things that are most organic.”
In another series of Field’s images in the Voyager 47 Club Lounge, a traditional one-person sailing canoe with a nontraditional coral pink sits under puffy clouds on the sea while a bikini-clad woman holds aloft a similarly pinkpareo on the beach.
“The female figure is such a beautiful thing, with the billowing shape of a blanket or pareo that’s being shaken out to get all the sand off, and at the same time it mimics the beauty or elegance of the sailing canoe behind,” Field observes. “When you name a boat, it’s most often a she, so I was kind of getting lost in the beauty of the cutie shaking her pareo and the wind is kicking in, and at the same time the wind is kicking in for the sailing canoe. They’re doing two different things but are part of the same story.”
The background clouds hold special meaning for Field, who notes he includes large ones in most of his works. “I’m a lover of clouds,” he says. “It’s the most spiritual thing, paying homage to the creator of everything we love here. I usually put a bird in the corner, too. It’s the dove of hope that you spot when you’re at the end of the rope, or the terns that you would see when you’re sailing from here to Kaua‘i or the back parts of Waipi‘o Valley.”
Field’s artworks are part of the resort’s larger collection of pieces by Hawai‘i Island artists—Sig and Kuhao Zane, Kumu Keala Ching and Kristie Fujiyama Kosmides among them — chosen to highlight the island’s history, spirit and beauty. The lobby also holds a priceless artifact of the paddling legacy that Field perpetuates and celebrates: Alapi‘i, a wooden outrigger canoe that the ancestral people of Keauhou used to fish for opelu, which fed their families and also served as game bait for larger fish. Like the tradition of outrigger canoe paddling that inspires Field, opelu fishing continues today, and Alapi‘i’s place of honor reminds passers-by that the past is always present and vibrant in Keauhou.
