Low Summer Light

20 × 16 in. | Watercolor on unstretched canvas | 2026
Available, framed

On view at Morini Gallery at the Mass Arts Center
AbstractScapes: by Sea, City, Village or Field
Sept. 17–Nov. 15, 2026

20 × 16 in. | Watercolor on unstretched canvas | 2026
Available

Nantucket keeps finding its way into my work.

Not literally. I’m not especially interested in painting dunes or beach grass or reproducing a particular view. What stays with me is harder to pin down: the light, the atmosphere, the way color seems to change depending on where you’re standing and when you’re looking.

That was somewhere in the background as I worked on Low Summer Light.

The upper part of the painting reads as blue from a distance. But when I photographed it, I realized how quickly that blue changes as your eye moves through the piece. It gets cooler and paler toward the top, then slips into gray, green and almost charcoal farther down. There are small flashes of pink and ochre buried in the lower half that are easy to miss until you get close.

That feels very Nantucket to me.

A color you could have sworn was blue becomes silver. Green turns gray. Dark grasses catch the light and suddenly look almost translucent.

The painting has that same quality of being difficult to pin down.

From across a space, Low Summer Light feels soft and atmospheric. Up close, there’s much more happening. Pigment gathers and breaks apart. Marks overlap. Small bits of color appear and disappear. The lower half is dense and active, while the large open area above it gives all of that activity somewhere to go.

I think that contrast is what I like most about the painting.

It doesn’t ask you to see a particular place.

But for me, it carries something of those late summer afternoons on Nantucket when the light changes what you thought you were looking at.