Lincoln Woods State Park Plein Air Painting
9″ x 12“, Oil on Canvas, August 27, 2017
Lincoln Woods State Park, Lincoln, Rhode Island
by Charles C. Clear III
Lincoln Woods State Park in Lincoln, Rhode Island has well over 600 acres of pristine woodland. There are hills, valleys, waterfalls, glacial boulders, and magnificent trees everywhere you look. Right in the center is the picturesque Olney Pond, a sprawling body of water whose size and shape provide park-goers with countless views of its beauty. The Pond was featured in the 2011 movie “Moonrise Kingdom“, and decades earlier, Providence author H. P. Lovecraft spent a lot of time walking and writing at Lincoln Woods.
As you can imagine, there are many scenic views at the Park, any of which would be ideal for plein air painting. It can be very difficult to choose sometimes, but I never want to spend valuable time weighing one view over another when I could just be painting. That’s why I usually set up and get to work at the first opportunity.
August 27th, 2017 was a warm summer day. I knew I would be painting at Lincoln Woods but I hadn’t scouted any locations in advance. So I parked my car in the lot near the old Olney cemetery and walked down to a narrow path that runs between the Pond and a large pine grove. I immediately saw this opening in the trees and it looked like a tranquil scene, so I set up my easel and started painting. Everything went well except that my palette knife was missing, so I had to improvise with a bent piece of metal and a broken popsicle stick. As it turns out, they don’t work nearly as well….and yet I like the rough look of the foreground.
This painting was framed and donated to a fundraiser for The Healing Arts Program at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island.
Charles C. Clear III
cc@oceanstateart.com