Happy Sunday 🍵☕
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In the middle part of the year, every warm evening feels like a question.
Will I find a spot before the light gets dim? Is there something out there worth stopping for? The answer was almost always yes and almost always somewhere I hadn't thought to look yet.
For years I'd head to Half Moon, or someplace along the Hudson where the food is good enough and the water is right there and I could set up my easel, with a drink in one hand and pastel in another, listen to the sounds of water lapping up against the shore to watch the sun do its thing. But Half Moon takes a little time to get to and some nights the light doesn't wait. So there were plenty of times I'd just get in the car and drive, looking, taking turns I didn't usually take, hoping something would appear.
This was one of those nights.
I don't remember exactly what put me in the car. Restless, maybe. Tired of being inside. The light was already going when I left, so I knew I couldn't make it to the water. I just started driving. Took a couple turns I'd never taken. Ended up on a road I didn't recognize.
And then there was water. Right there, where I didn't expect it.
I kept driving slowly, looking for the angle. The surface was completely still, the kind of still that turns a pond into a mirror. And then I saw it: this tiny little island, barely big enough to hold a single tree, sitting right in the middle of the frame. That was the composition. That made the whole thing. I backed up until I found the spot, pulled as far off the road as I could, and set up on the trunk of the car.
Pastels out. Paper taped to the clipboard. The light was already changing, so I moved fast. I recorded myself drawing. I didn't talk, just worked. The kind of session where you stop thinking about what you're doing and just do it, and when you look up you can't believe what you got.
The clouds were blocking the sun in exactly the right way, lit up from underneath, and everything was reflecting perfectly below. Then as I was finishing up the piece a glimpse of orange graced the sky before laying to rest below the horizon, leaving it’s trace in shimmering reflections across the lower corner of my composition.
I've never been back.
Part of me keeps meaning to. Part of me keeps not going. I think maybe I don't want to find out it looks different. The piece came out the way it did because I showed up at the exact right moment on the exact right evening, and I don't know if that's repeatable. Some places you're only supposed to find once.
It was ten minutes from my front door. I drove past it for years and never knew it was there.
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.
We've been to Arizona, New Mexico, the Grand Canyon, Key West, Puerto Rico.. Now we're playing some home games. Turns out I didn't have to go far at all.
26 States down. 24 to go.
Want more from this one.. photos, the time-lapse video, details about where exactly this is? Just reply and ask. I've got plenty.
Sunset Serenity
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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