Evergreens in Central Park, February 2017
Evergreens, Central Park
I’m happy to report that I made a sale recently to a very nice man who bought it to give as a present to his daughter for her wedding. It turns out he searched for “Pine Trees” + “Central Park” on Google and came across my painting on my website https://walterlynnmosley.com/project/landscape-oil/evergreens_central_park_feb_17/ because that is where her fiancee proposed to her when they were in Central Park while visiting NYC. He sent me a photo of the pine trees (not in snow) to confirm they were the same trees and I was able to confirm that they were; I recognized the rock and the two trees side by side in the park (near Sheep Meadow Cafe and near the cafe located there).
He asked me to write a note concerning my feelings about the painting and why I chose to paint that spot. Here is what I wrote:
There are two approaches for me when it comes to plein air painting. One is I see something when I’m out and about going about my business, I see something and say, “hey I want to paint that” and then I plan on returning to it with my painting equipment when I have the opportunity. Often it’s a seasonal thing, say for instance a particular time of autumn when the colors are at a certain stage (not necessarily at peak) or it could be just a building or some landmark that seems to fall into a good composition. Sometimes it’s may be a place that has personal significance for me, almost always there’s some degree of that, some history, but other times it’s a purely visual thing, I feel somehow that a particular scene has a compositional possibility, I’m not sure if that’s how I would define it, basically I just “feel” that I want to paint something because it’s interesting in some way that I can’t really describe with words. So that’s one way I find subject matter and another way, which is risky, is to go out to paint but not having anything specifically in mind that I want to paint. Instead I search out my subject matter at the time. Although I say it’s risky, I have never come away without having found something that interested me enough to want to paint. So this painting happens to be a case of the latter.
So I was walking around in Central Park situated between The Mall and Sheep Meadow, an area I know probably as intimately as any place on earth. I was mostly looking at the trees, which I had been interested in, the trees that had lost their leaves and were showing their glorious anatomy, the twisting and spiraling limbs with glorious rhythm. So I was walking around looking at these trees and then stopped in my tracks as I saw these two pine trees, which unlike the other trees I had been looking at, had all their foliage . They essentially looked the same in winter as they do in summer (as far as foliage goes). And at the time I saw it the light was hitting the two pine trees just right, showing their particular hue of greens with the odd burnt colors which played off the warm buildings and warmly lit snow contrasted with the cool blue shadows of the sunny day. So I knew I had found a really stunning subject matter.
I did many paintings this past winter, several snow scenes (from December 2016 to February 2017) but consider this painting “Evergreens in Central Park (February 2017” as the high point among of the season.