After Harvest, First Rains (2025)

Three and a Half Years in the Making

When we relocated from NYC back to CA, I went from years spent jogging along the Upper Manhattan Hudson Greenway—which was gorgeous—to years spent jogging through Alexander Valley of Sonoma County—also gorgeous. Super hot, but gorgeous and, as Californians are wont to say—at least it’s a dry heat.

After Harvest, First Rains (2025), 36x48” oils on cradled panel. Original art available

I had noticed in prior years that a few vineyards would pool rainwater for a bit, if there was a particularly hard storm. This would usually be towards the edge or corner of the vineyards, where the planted area met the burm of a neighboring road a few feet above. I always found it fascinating and endeavored to paint it at some point. Problem was that I was always mid-jog and not quite on my art game enough to stop and shoot reference. When I finally decided I was going to paint such a scene, I took a bunch of photos for reference after the first big rain of the season, late October 2021. These vines had of course been picked already, but the leaves had not turned autumn oranges and reds yet.

What I particularly loved about this scene was the visual confusion it caused to see a big expanse of sky, and the vines growing out of it. So I took the references but wasn’t sure when I’d get to it. The next few months were difficult and busy, and by the beginning of 2022 we were also moving house, moving into temporary digs for a few months. Work was busy on top of it all, and events continued apace.

After taping off the edges so they’d be clean wood at the end, I primed and then applied a base coat using that lint free rag there. When it dried, I gridded off the image using thread affixed to the sides. These corresponded to my reference so I could freehand draw the scene.

So it wasn’t until early March 2023 that I had a short window of time after turning in a set of work (the first wave of Magic’s Final Fantasy set) and finishing a set of Hearts for Hardware paintings that had likewise sat a couple of years unfinished, before I was going to get rolling on my next illustration (Boggart Bog for Magic’s Modern Horizons 3). I knew I’d just get a few days to work, maybe a week, and had no idea how long it would be until I could get back to it. But YOLO, right? So I picked up a large 36x48” cradled wood panel, primed it and got to work.

I blocked in the basic shapes using Ultramarine blue. The underpainting if I recall was Raw Sienna and some white.

From there, I blocked in some of the basic color areas as essentially large shapes. I’d begun painting the distant hills here, as well.

Here I’ve solidified the sky base down in the reflection below. Hints of that Sienna still vibrate through here and there. The distant hills are essentially done.

After about a week or so, it was sadly time to move on. While waiting for paint to dry one day, I took another panel (24x36”) which I primed at the same time, and quickly blocked in colors for another landscape, not even the equivalent of step three here. That painting has gone completely untouched since March, 2023.

Being a big, cradled panel, it was a bit of a curse to have it around unfinished as I had no good place to put it, so I leaned it against book cases, behind the studio door, here, there. I kept moving it around for an entire year until I could get back to it. During this time, after a few months, I kept it turned away from me so I could stop looking at it. I didn’t want to get tired of it.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any photos from early 2024, when I had a similar gap of time, but I likewise spent maybe three or four days on the painting then, in which I mostly worked at defining the reflected shadow shapes in the water, including where sky overlays these shapes, as seen in the final. Then I put it aside again to begin working on some amazing Magic projects that haven’t released as of this writing.

A few folks who saw this painting on the easel prior to starting to put the vines in were constantly confused as to what they were looking at. My wife had a lot of faith that it was going to start coming together, someday. Right about here, I felt it had turned that corner.

Finally, early April of 2025 another window opened up and I painted in the sky and the distant trees on the horizon and the bones of the vines. Completed and turned in some more projects and then late May decided I was going to take it out to completion, and I was going to not schedule work for a bit to get it done, and this Substack going.

That whole middle area is a sea of foliage, mostly undifferentiated. Here I am blocking in the shadow shapes loosely.

Nearing completion, there were some aspects of the irrigation and trellising that I wasn’t sure I was going to include. I decided the reality of these aspects outweighed the idealism of not including them.