By Mitch Lee
I would guess that Adirondack sunsets are not much different from sunsets in other places in the world that boast natural charm and scenic allure.
I just have a deep reverence for the magical late afternoon moments when the sun hovers close to the mountain tops and frames in hundreds of dark greens and grey slate.
There are days when the clouds and the skyline burst out in pinks and oranges, giving the background a regal halo of color that can only be found in nature.
From the 19th century group of landscape painters of the Hudson River School who sought to capture realistic depictions of nature, to the early 20th century watercolorists, many artists have been challenged to capture the essence of Adirondack sunsets.
In my own art work I have tried to capture the essence of cloud formations and colors as the sun descends in the horizon.
But it seemed impossible to express what my eyes witnessed in those twelve to fourteen perfect minutes.
For a few years I put a halt to recording these sunsets and simply enjoyed the visual aspects of what only nature could create.
But in the past few months I have revisited my sketch books and reevaluated my 35 years of interpretations.
Some of the renditions have mountains and lakes in the foreground, while others were sketched through a window.
In each one I found a new merited interpretation of color and form.
I witnessed my own evolutions of brush stroke, blended color, and color harmony in the many years of recording the events.
At age ten my eyes were drawn towards the blend of colors. I could see 13 values of orange and yellow.
Although a bit sloppy and without polish I could sense the fade of line of sight to a wisp of flat grey white.
By age twelve I was trying to get my clouds to look more transparent, yet they did not feel as light as I wanted them.
They were dense and heavy, as if they could never hover and let the wind take them.
By age fifteen I could dry brush my clouds to feel airy and casting shadows on one another. But my sun seemed to just be peeking out from them as if it were an afterthought and not a part of the subject at all.
By age twenty, after a few semesters in art school, I could deftly pull off a near photographic feel to any sunset in oil or watercolor.
However, they still lacked the punch of a sunset I was looking for.
It was at that point that I stopped trying to capture Adirondack sunsets. I had grown in my own work and studied the skylines and cloud formations of Vermeer and other masters of art.
But I still was not satisfied that I had captured the essence of my Adirondack sunsets.
Later on in my 30’s I pulled off a couple sunsets as requested by clients who hired me to convey the feeling of a sunset from their camps so they could hang them on the walls of their homes in New Jersey or Connecticut.
But it was not until I took a good long look at the entire body of this work that I could see I had always interpreted the sunsets exactly the same way.
If only I could convey to the viewer how warm or cold or windy the day was, and how the Balsam and Cedar smelled as it lingered in the air.
Or the chirping of Boreal birds and the lapping of waves of lake water against the shore.
If I could express these things I could paint a sunset, and that would be mine.
Mitch Lee, Adirondack native & storyteller,
lives at Inlet. ltmitch3rdny@aol.com