Autumn on the Bay

I painted this from a stretch of shoreline I'd walked past for years without really looking at. In late September the light sits lower, and the color leaves the hills in stages until, for a few weeks, the water holds more of it than the land does. That reversal is what I wanted — the ground going quiet while the surface stays lit. The work isn't one afternoon. I returned to the same vantage across several weeks, and what's here is a composite, edited toward the version that felt true rather than the one that was accurate. Most of my decisions were about edges. I let the waterline stay loose and unresolved, since that's how it reads when you're standing in front of it, and held the line where the far shore meets the sky, because that's the only place the eye wants something firm. The palette stays narrow on purpose — ochres, a cooling gray-green, one warm note near the horizon that the rest of the picture is arranged around. I'm not after a record of a place. I'm after the short season in which a familiar view stops being familiar, and the few weeks a year when it's worth stopping.