I often enjoy painting at the Old Bethpage Village Restoration, which is just off of exit 48 of the Long Island Expressway. The village consists of actual 19^th century buildings, homes, a church, etc. which have been moved from their original locations around the Island, brought here, and arranged like they might have been in a 19^th century village. The result is a lovely, quiet, bucolic place just where Nassau County meets Suffolk County at one of the most congested exits on one of the Island’s most traveled highways.

The Village often plays host to various events such as the Long Island Fair, demonstrations of 19^th century life and, on the day I visited, a Civil War battle staged by enthusiastic reenactors of this tumultuous period in our history.

My intention for going there to paint on this day was to try to portray one of the camps that were set up by the reenactors. But I have had the house I ultimately ended up painting on my mind for a number of weeks now and the light seemed just right. By that I mean that the light was just right when the sun wasn’t behind one of the many summer day cumulous clouds that moved across the sky on the warm summer breeze of the day. These are among the perils that on site landscapers must deal with as a matter of course and I will not vent my frustrations here!

After about an hour of painting I noticed that the “Confederate” army was marshalling and began to march to a dirge-like drum beat toward the staged battle which took place just out of my view behind a wooded area to the rear of my position. After a short time I heard the two armies engage, lines form with the outdated Napoleonic tactics of the era and the inevitable order of “Ready, Aim…”

I found myself very moved by the sounds. Volleys of musket fire, shouts, screams, the “Rebel Yell”, and thunderous cannon fire that shook my panel on my easel. Soon young parents began to retreat past me with frightened crying children for whom this all seemed too loud and too real. I was reminded of the civilians who went out to watch the first battle of Bull Run at the outset of the war, not at all prepared for the carnage they witnessed.

There was something about not being able to see the action, which made it all the more real for me. I began to think that while I was painting this genuine farmhouse, while listening to the unthinkable chaos of the battle, that there must have been some frightened soldier out on the field behind me…and all he could think about was getting safely home…home to the house I was painting.

“Hewlett House” is available for sale. For details, click on “Paintings and Prints” to the left and then click on “Web Site Exclusives”.

Things have been extraordinarily busy around here lately but I guess that is a good thing. Last weekend I had the opening at Bannerman Island Gallery in Beacon, NY and this past Friday night was the opening at Gallery North in Setauket. So, it was such an enjoyable experience to get into the van with my good painting buddies Anthony Davis and Jane McGraw-Teubner and drive in to New York City to paint in Central Park yesterday, July 18^th, 2009.

The reason for the schlep into the city was the new PBS TV series entitled “Passport and Palette” which follows different on site painters around the world and chronicles their experiences as well as sharing their advice. The main participants in the series i.e Kevin MacPherson, Ken Backhaus, Joe Anna Arnett, etc. were all painting and filming in Central Park near the Bethesda Fountain yesterday and other painters were encouraged to come and join them. It seemed to me at about mid-day that every New York painter who paints on site must have been there, all crowded around the fountain, including the great Tony Bennett who is a lover of painting and was doing a nice watercolor. There is probably no where else in the world outside of New York City that you can turn up to paint on a Saturday morning and end up working next to Tony Bennett!

I love living in such close proximity to the “Capitol of the World” and really enjoyed painting there. “Central Park II 7.18.09” is the second of two 8 X 10’s  that I did that day and is, as far as I’m concerned, the kind of view that makes Central Park unique. This painting is available for sale. Click on "Paintings and Prints" to the left and follow the link to "Website Exclusives".

I discovered the fountain of my youth today. I had gone painting with my friends Anthony and Jane at the tidal marsh inside of Caumsett State Park on Lloyd Neck, Long Island, NY. It only took about an hour to get my painting to where I wanted it to be and, as Anthony and Jane were still working on theirs, I decided to take a walk.

I grabbed my water bottle and started to follow a path that headed west. After only a few minutes I found myself thinking back on the last summer vacation I took with my parents and younger sister to Cape Cod. The house we stayed at was out on a spit of land that was a couple of miles down a sandy road from a small town. I was in my late teens and was heavily involved in my first “relationship” with a girl who’d promised to “write to me every day that I was away”. So I faithfully, and with great anticipation, walked to the post office every day in hopes of the promised correspondence. Innocence, as you shall see becomes a central theme of this journey.

The air was quite warm and the sun had come out, but the most outstanding feature of the day was the sky. Mammoth white summer day cumulous clouds were boiling up over Long Island Sound. They were not the kind of clouds you get to see every day: so white they cast a bright reflection on the Sound and so low that an innocent young boy might have felt he could jump up and just swat the bottoms of these giants with his fingertips. I confess that this no longer quite so innocent adult considered making this irrational attempt.

At some point the sandy path was replaced by a rough-hewn timber walk as the surrounding area lowered to meet the marsh. I thought they looked like telephone poles that had been milled from round to square. All I could smell was the heavy scent of creosote and my mind drifted further back into my past, and the dock at Fair Harbor on Fire Island, which was of a similar construction and smell. When I was even younger my family used to vacation there over the last two weeks in August. A young boy filled with innocence and wonder could spend entire days swimming, fishing, exploring, and flying kites at the ocean. I would leave our rented house first thing in the morning and not see my family until it got dark. I still feel that I lived like Tom Sawyer over those two weeks. No adventure was left unexplored. The same innocent boy could also have his first summer romance: a kiss and timid sexual experience on that same beach in later years. In hindsight, the inevitable move away from the innocence.

A rabbit darted out of the brush along the side of the path and hopped away from me, stopped and turned to look at me as I slowly approached. He let me get to within a couple of feet of him before I stopped and we stared at each other. He did not seem to fear me. Perhaps I appeared to him not as a middle-aged man who has lived better than half of his time but a young boy filled with innocence. The Alice in Wonderland connection only occurs to me now. Did I follow him down the rabbit hole?

The sand replaced the timber walk and the path was lined with flowering cactus. The marsh approached the path and I stopped to admire a large number of fiddler crabs working busily along the shore. How often does the less than innocent adult stop to take the time to simply watch nature do what nature does? It will never again escape me that, as a landscape painter, I am blessed that this is part of my job. Observe and portray, observe and portray.

The path ended at a salt-water pond that is accessed by an inlet still ahead of me. The spit of land I have been walking on is narrowing, my journey is coming to an end and I sense some imminent climax. I turned to my right and walked, my legs tickled by the tips of the dune grass, toward the Sound. I went up over a small rise and down to the beach. It had been too many years since I had taken off my shoes and socks to walk the beach and I was immediately reminded of just how hot the sand can get! As if by some final trial, some act of contrition for my abandoned innocence, I tried my best to bear the pain of walking on the rocky beach. There is only another fifty yards to the end. To my left is a rope, which keeps people out of a federally protected Piping Plover nesting area. It suddenly appears that the beach is getting up and moving toward the sea as scores of the Plover, whose slate gray color is the perfect camouflage to blend with the rocky shore, scatter in front of me.

I reach the end and stand barefoot and ankle deep in the water, like a participant in some old time Baptist baptism in the Deep South, waiting to have my sins washed away. I look in every direction and feel as if I have returned to some time before my innocence escaped me. I feel myself sinking, losing height, as the receding waves take the sand out from under me. I wonder if I am getting shorter, if my hair is reverting from its “school of hard knocks” gray to the dark brown of my youth. The wind blows, the clouds tower in surreal columns and every color is clear and vibrant and I am finally emotionally overcome. All that comes to my mind is forgiveness, forgiveness of others and myself. I feel rinsed, cleansed, and for just that moment, innocent.

But then an adult thought occurs to me. Anthony and Jane must be waiting and it is time for me to be getting back and, as if on cue, my cell phone rings and a cloud moves to block the sun.