Chapel by the Stream, Autumn
Oil on canvas, 30 × 20 inches, painted in 2021. A white-walled chapel sits behind a wooden footbridge, the stream beneath it running cold and fast. The vertical format suits the subject: the eye moves upward from the rushing water, across the bridge's weathered planks, and settles on the chapel's pale facade against what one imagines as an autumn canopy. The season implied by the title lends the composition a particular quality of light, the kind of thin, clear afternoon brightness that arrives after the leaves have begun to turn and the air has lost its warmth.