Gold Before Dark

I didn't grow up wanting to be a painter. I grew up wanting to be outside, in the woods behind our house, along creek banks, anywhere the light did something worth stopping for. The sketchbook came first, long before the oil paint. It was just the best tool I had for holding onto a moment before it disappeared.

Gold Before Dark is what that instinct looks like fifty years later.

This is an 11×14 oil painted in response to a cottonwood grove I encountered at dusk in Montana, the kind of fleeting light that exists for maybe twenty minutes before the day closes. The trunks caught it first: that warm apricot glow that cottonwoods go in golden hour, almost luminous against the darkening understory. Behind them, rolling hills fading into mauve and ochre, and above, a pale blue sky still holding the last of the day.

I painted it because I couldn't not paint it. That impulse, the one that says this matters, pay attention, is why I became an artist in the first place. The West keeps offering me those moments, and I keep trying to be ready for them.