At the end of the day

I walk by this spot often, at the park near my house. It looks like this for about an hour a so a day, as long as the sun is out. For most of the day, through late afternoon, the sun is not low enough to cast these dramatic shadows: mostly, the entire ground is just a mass of shadows. It sounds pretty simplistic when I write it, but it is a surprisingly dynamic place. Last week I came to this spot to try to paint and there wasn’t anything — no dramatic shadows, no sunlight shining between the trunks. Because I came too early.

It seems like even in late afternoon there should be at least a little bit of a trunk shadow, a bit of line and definition to the shadow, but I think because these trees here are so close together, and they have so much interlocking foliage, that there is basically a blob of a shadow until the very end of the day, when the sun is almost setting.

It took two tries to get anything reasonable — and by the time I was on the second painting, I was mostly working from memory, as a cloud bank had obscured the sun more or less. This was at the end of a rather long day at work/school but it felt good to get out lay down some brush strokes. I think I captured a little bit of my mood, not exactly impatient, but decisive. Not waiting around to get it perfect. Which in many ways is just the kind of attitude I need for painting.