“Blue Ridge Summer Afternoon” (26” x 40K”)
Not all the paintings I work on come from a personal story, but a fare number of them do. This piece, “Blue Ridge Summer Afternoon” definitely has a story. Back in 2020, as the pandemic was sweeping the country, Joy and I (like so many others) were doing all we could do to keep safe and to help lower our stress levels as much as we could. For us, this meant we needed to spend time exploring the outdoors on our local hiking trails. In North Carolina, our mountains are not giants. They’re not the Alps. They are not the bombastic, dramatic “teenage” mountains like the Sierra Nevada range in California or the the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. The Appalachians are ancient. Once high and mighty, they are now just a bare hint of what they once were when Africa was pushing up against the east coast of North America. But what the Blue Ridge lack in massive grandeur, they certainly make up for in the way of quiet, peaceful beauty. I have grown to love these gentle, worn down mountains.
“…we had a quiet day to ourselves, celebrating nature and the kindness of God.”
This one afternoon in the summer of 2020, we packed our backpacks with a couple books, plenty of water and our lunch, and headed south to the border of Smoky Mountains National Park. The weather was perfect for hiking…warm but not too hot, slightly cloudy (we got just enough shade now and then) and a gentle (if not humid) breeze coming in from the southwest. On our entire hike, we passed only one young couple and a golden retriever, so we had a quiet day to ourselves, celebrating nature and the kindness of God. It was wonderful. Imagine complete silence, only broken by the leaves rustling now and then in the occasional breeze and the ubiquitous sound of song birds, seeming to be completely enjoying the day as much as we were.
By mid day, we made it to the top of the crest, where we were promised a good view on the Alltrails review we’d read, and we stopped to have lunch and just sit. We found some decent shade beneath a couple balsam trees and planted ourselves there for the afternoon. We talked some, but mostly just sat, read our books and just soaked in the peace. It was really needed right then, and I so appreciated the opportunity (just 90 minutes from our home) to be there, to be with Joy, and to be with the song birds.
This painting was composed from several photos I took that day.
