Early Spring Afternoon
oil on panel 7 1/2" x 9 3/4"
I was heading out to the studio to gather up my kit and hike down our quiet dirt road, to find a spot from which to paint. I was taken by the yellow forsythia and my old aluminum row boat with its faded blue cover. That boat I will take out on the middle Potomac river and throw down my homemade anchors near the shade of a river island and work the shadow and light into some sort of paintings. In 1875, Monet had moved his growing family out of Paris up along to a rural village along the Seine. He made a series of paintings of the construction of a bridge; piles of lumber, the superstructure going up, the view downstream from under the bridge. Seeing a picture of Monet painting on the Seine in a small boat rigged up as a studio inspired me to buy this boat. In these early paintings, he wasn't yet the colorist painting the haystacks or the cathedral facade, in these works he worked boldly with slabs and shapes of paint in descriptive color and capturing the luminescence of the river in changing light. Though I've only seen these paintings once at a retrospective at the National Gallery, they remain my favorites, except perhaps the late, huge paintings of water reflections and lily pads. So, as I set up in the side yard and built this little spring painting, I kept the memory of those paintings in mind and maybe also my image of the artist himself, working along the river, reveling in the light and the paint.
