Shadows Lengthen

There's this little boulevard of trees that separates one of the fields up at my grandfather's house from the neighbor's fields. Two lines of parallel trees that farmers past pushed any rocks they plowed up in the fields up against. In the summer heat, the sheep huddle in the shade of these trees if it's a particularly warm day. This makes traversing this little lane somewhat hazardous for one's shoes if the sheep have been active in either field recently, but it's always such a beautiful stroll provided you're willing to watch your step. This painting is from right in the middle of that little lane between fields, in the late afternoon as the sun casts long shadows across the fields. Every five minutes of the sun dipping towards the horizon yields another twenty feet of cast shadow. That really oblique angle of light really infuses the scene with a lot of color too. I love the feel of this particular moment - light and color changing dramatically moment-to-moment, the same way it does every day at about this time, weather permitting. This was my attempt at capturing that in paint and (hopefully) letting you all feel the peace of that fleeting forever moment too.

-ZR