Happy Sunday 🍵☕
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I've been going to that spot my whole life.
When I was a kid it was called the Charthouse. You didn't go there on a regular Tuesday — you went for a birthday, an occasion, something worth marking. It sits right on the Hudson, and even as a child I understood that this was a special place. The kind of place that makes you feel like every moment before and after has somehow been altered.
Years later, when landscapes became my subject of interest, I came back to it the way you come back to anything you've always loved: somehow different; somehow the same. I had an easel now though. I had pastels and charcoal and the specific hunger of someone trying to learn how to see. I went there constantly. Quick sunset studies, charcoal sketches, chasing the light the way I chased it everywhere else. The water, the rocks, the train tracks running along the shore, the colors the sky makes over the Hudson when the sun goes down, the city twinkling in the distance. There was always something worth drawing. I have more work from that stretch of river than almost anywhere else.
But I never drew the building.
It was just there. A restaurant. Nice enough, full of people, good seafood. In the daylight there was always something more interesting to look at.
Then one warm night I missed the sunset and went anyway.
I walked in, got a drink, walked through the back, out onto the deck, down along the rocks until I had enough distance to see the whole thing. And the restaurant was glowing. Lit up from inside, people at the tables, people on the deck, that warm amber light spilling out over the water. The George Washington Bridge sat faint and small in the distance, and beyond it, dead center in my field of view, the faintest suggestion of the city. The right side of the frame was dark water and dark cliffs, a post catching its own reflection below, creating just enough geometry to hold the composition together.
Everything I'd spent years looking past was now the whole painting.
That's the thing about drawing at night. The detail falls away. Your brain stops filling in what it thinks it knows and you're left with just light, shadow, and what's actually in front of you. The restaurant had always been there. I just needed the dark to finally see it.
That's what this newsletter is. One place at a time. Where I have been, what I have seen, and what I was personally moved by.
Still playing home games. Sometimes the thing worth seeing was never hidden. You just hadn't looked at it that way yet.
26 States down. 24 to go.
Want more from this one.. the charcoal pieces from the daylight years, what the Hudson looks like from those rocks at sunset, some of the studies I did along the river? Just reply and ask. I've got plenty.
“Nightlight on the Hudson”
Just an Easel and a Dream is Cody's ongoing plein air pastel project: drawing in all 50 states, one landscape at a time.
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Thank You!