Soft Morning at Brookside Gardens

Tea House at Brookside Gardens, oils on canvas panel, 12" x 9"

The morning was overcast yet bright, what the Irish would call "a soft day," when I set out for Brookside Gardens to join the Howard County plein air painters for our weekly outing. After the recent rains from Hurricane Irene everything sparkled with fullness and bloom. The leaves of the dogwoods and maples were starting to show that bronzy color that signals the transition to fall.

I had walked around on Monday morning after hanging my show at the Visitors' Center to scout out the location for today's painting, and decided to focus on a view of the Japanese Tea House framed by the pink flower heads of fountain grasses--this view is so distinctive it's an icon for the gardens. Two other painters were already there, Rita and Brenda, but Brenda didn't feel well and left shortly after.

The skies began to darken before I'd even laid out the paint on my palette--we might have to work fast today if we hoped to get anything done. The first peal of thunder was distant, and we kept on working through the few drops that came. Then the sky brightened a bit, giving me hope it might clear up. The thing about working fast is how loose it forces one to be--I was slapping the paint on as fast as I could, trying to get the colors and shapes down.

Around eleven several more peals of thunder, this time close enough to be alarming, finally sent us packing. It began to rain before I had put everything away and raced to my car. Driving home, the rain let up but puddles indicated it had poured earlier. By the time I got home it had cleared and the rest of the day became sunny, but it was too late to go back. I finished he painting at home from memory, covering a few spots of blank canvas here and there and defining a few edges.

Before the Rain

Before the Rain, oils on canvas panel, 12" x 9." Contact artist for price.

I felt totally drained after a rough week at work (a fifteen-and-a-half-hour day on Monday), and a bit gloomy about my art prospects. Our usual Friday class had been canceled so I'd driven up to Havre de Grace to pick up my artwork at the Riverview Gallery--it had been three years since I joined the gallery and in that time made not a single sale. It seemed as good a time as any to pull out and save myself a long drive several times a year. For lack of anything better to do, in the afternoon I applied half-heartedly to the Ellicott City Paint It juried plein air weekend in August. Why must the Howard County Arts Council schedule a plein air event during the muggiest time of the year?

On Saturday morning I puttered in the garden, setting out my summer veggies and a few marigolds. The marauding deer had eaten all the tops of the sugar snap peas, setting back my harvest to perhaps just a handful of peas this year (sigh!). The forecast called for rain in the afternoon, so I thought of Brookside Gardens, where I could paint under the shelter of one of their gazebos.

I found my favorite gazebo had been "improved" with the addition of a concrete-and-resin chess table and two seats right in the middle--leaving no room for me to set up my easel (why can't these people leave well enough alone? They've been "improving" the garden ever since they got a bad review from some snooty British gardening magazine decades ago, much to the garden's detriment).

I set up my Guerilla paint box on the low stone wall surrounding the gazebo and managed to sit stradding the wall to paint this view of another gazebo tucked on a small island in one of the ponds. The subdued light and the lush foliage offered a great opportunity for a study in greens, something I've been wanting to tackle. It began to rain just before I finished, but my spirits had risen greatly in just a few hours of artistic exercise.