This morning was the sort of day so perfect that the beauty of it seems to surge up and overwhelm your senses, exhilarates every pore as cool water after a plunge, and you simply have to sing, paint, or swim to keep afloat. And so I sketched quite madly for a while.
Harold Weston, 1922
alone with paint in the adironacks
In 1920 Weston and a local carpenter built a one-room log cabin near St. Huberts, New York, in the heart of the Adirondack wilderness. With a staff to support his half-paralyzed leg, Weston hiked the mountains and rowed the lakes, chopped his wood and howled at the moon. He lunged, hopped, and swung himself with powerful arms and climbed elevations to see and study every change in the light, colors, and forms. He sketched in oils and pencil on cardboard. In the studio he painted “serial picture songs” on canvas.
Seventy sketches and sixty-three paintings were shown at the modernist Montross Gallery in New York City in November 1922, winning high praise from the critics.