Farewell to Summer
Summer has always meant so many things to me. Long stretches of time to fill up with traveling, swimming, reading, daydreaming, seeing friends and family and of course painting. For a number of reasons, this summer offered only a very limited chance for travel opportunities. I took one lovely trip with two other plein air artists and we painted almost constantly. However, since most of my time was spent in NYC, particularly in Brooklyn, I had the rare opportunity of limiting my subject matter to this borough. Although I have often painted in this borough where I live, when provided with this limitation, it actually invited many new painting possibilities. The challenge became revisiting places I had painted at an earlier time and finding new places to paint that I had never considered. For my last summer painting, I chose to paint at Union Street & 8th avenue. I had painted in the same spot many years ago. I was so excited to approach this same location again and see how my interpretation would vary from my first attempt. When I came home, I pulled out the older painting and I was surprised to see how very different these two paintings were next to each other! One was more carefully rendered. The other was freer in the brush strokes used and focused more on the relationship between the trees and the building. Those trees had really grown so much since the last time I had painted at this location! Below are the two paintings of the same location.
