Prairie Contemplation

Sumter County, Alabama
May 1, 2025
Oil on canvas
6 x 9 in. (15.2 x 22.9 cm)

Artist's collection

On my last morning visiting the remnant prairie patches in Sumter County it was raining, so I parked by one of the cow pastures that now occupies the historic Wild Horse Prairie to paint this little imagined view through the windshield. Later in the studio I lightly touched it up. It’s the way I think the scene might have looked from that spot centuries ago on a rainy spring day. I replaced today’s pasture grasses and horizon-blocking cedar hedgerows with long views to distant scattered oak groves over a greensward of prairie flowers and grasses.