Golden Hour

Plein air painting is such a different exercise than still life. It's such a vibrant endeavor, bypassing the attention to detail of a painting in a studio. Recently I sat at Lagerman Agricultural Preserve for four evenings during the hour before the the sun descended behind the mountain peaks. One night my palette and canvas board was dotted with raindrops that threatened to drive me away. Another night we arrived and the heavens opened with a tremendous storm which gave way, fifteen minutes later, to a double rainbow and sun. 

The light was constantly changing making the brush strokes of fleeting color hard to capture. The landscape was literally changing every moment, and every evening when I went back it was different again. There was something so beautiful about this constant change though and as I sat painting I felt as alive as the scene I was viewing. There was about a ten minute period before the sun finally dipped behind the mountain where I felt as if the stones themselves were singing out. The birds were singing their cacophony of music, the insects buzzing, the flowers glinting with the final rays, the water traced with gold, until the fall of light and the ensuing quiet. It was an energy that I have not yet been able to capture. I echo the words of Claude Monet where he said, "I would like to paint the way a bird sings." That is the wildness of life that I long to paint with strokes of color across canvas. 

Golden Hour by Kirsty Sarris