“Daybreak, Shallowbag Bay”: Capturing the Threshold of Dawn
There's a particular moment at daybreak that has always captivated me—that fleeting transition when the world begins to emerge from the near-monochrome of night and slowly remembers its color. It's not quite sunrise, not quite darkness, but something in between. A threshold. When I set out to paint Shallowbag Bay in Manteo, North Carolina, it was this elusive moment I wanted to capture.
“Daybreak, Shallowbag Bay” | 24”x36” | Oil on Canvas
The Challenge of Mist and Mood
Studio work offers a different set of pleasures and challenges than plein air painting. Where my outdoor paintings happen quickly—about two hours from start to finish—this piece demanded patience and sustained attention. Over the course of a week, I spent roughly 25 to 30 hours building up the layers, adjusting the values, and trying to solve a particular puzzle: how do you paint atmosphere itself? At 24”x36”, this is my largest landscape painting to date.
Mist is tricky. It desaturates everything, softens edges, and collapses space. But a painting still needs depth, still needs structure. Too much softness and the scene falls flat; too much clarity and the mist disappears. I found myself constantly negotiating between these two forces, trying to preserve the moody, ethereal quality of that dawn moment while still giving the viewer a sense of distance and form.
Finding Light in the Gray
What drew me most to this scene was that sliver of warm light peeking out above the cloud bank—a hint of the sun about to break through. In a composition dominated by cool grays and muted earth tones, that small band of warmth becomes the painting's heartbeat. It's the promise that day is coming, that color will return, that the world is waking up.
The loblolly pines stand as sentinels in the middle distance, their dark silhouettes anchoring the composition. There's something about the way pines hold their shape even in heavy mist—they refuse to completely dissolve into the atmosphere. They remain themselves, solid and present, even as everything around them softens.
The Joy of Grass and Water
One of the breakthroughs in this painting came with the foreground grass. I was excited to find I could keep my brushstrokes loose and gestural while still maintaining a convincing sense of detail and texture. The grass doesn't need to be literal—each blade doesn't need to be rendered—but it does need to feel specific, like this particular marsh at this particular moment.
The water presented its own meditation. Reflections in still water can be seductive for a painter, but they're also demanding. The mirrored trees and sky needed to be soft enough to read as reflections, yet clear enough to enhance the sense of atmosphere rather than muddy it. It took time to find the right balance.
Studio Time vs. Plein Air Energy
Working in the studio offers luxuries that plein air painting doesn't allow. I could step back, live with the painting for days, make adjustments as I saw problems or opportunities. There's no racing against changing light, no numb fingers from the cold. But there's also something I miss about the immediacy of outdoor work—the urgency, the directness, the feeling of capturing something before it vanishes.
This painting required both approaches in a sense: the careful observation and problem-solving of studio work, combined with the need to remember and honor the fleeting quality of that dawn moment. It's a reminder that different subjects demand different approaches, and part of growing as a painter is learning to match your process to what the scene requires.
"Daybreak, Shallowbag Bay" represents a quieter kind of beauty than the vibrant wildflower fields I often paint. It's about subtlety, about the spaces between things, about waiting for the world to reveal itself. And in the end, it's about that magical threshold moment when night begins to release its hold and day hasn't quite arrived—when the world exists in perfect, misty suspension.
Timelapse video of the process of painting the water and reflections.
