Long Summer Days

This piece is a study - a smaller exploration for a much larger painting that has since sold. There's something I love about studies like this one: they carry all the essential decisions of the bigger piece, just distilled down to their purest form.

Here, the trees take center stage - their canopies rendered in that deep, silvery blue-black that lets the gold behind them do all the talking. The trunks lean and cross in a loose tangle, each one catching a little light along its edge, while the pale grasses below echo the same gestural, sweeping brushwork. It's a study in contrast: the density and weight of the foliage against the openness of the gold sky and quiet grey hill.

There's a particular stillness to long summer days - that hour when the light turns heavy and gold, and everything, even the trees, seems to lean into it. This piece is my attempt to hold onto that stillness, distilled to its essentials.