“Haw Summer”: Painting a Place That Feels Like Home

There are certain places that have a way of settling something inside you. For me, the Haw River is one of those places. This particular stretch, on one of my favorite trails in North Carolina, has become a kind of sanctuary—a place I return to when I need to reset, to breathe, to remember what matters.

What I love most about the Haw is its character. It's not a deep, dramatic river; it's intimate and complex, full of rocky islands and grassy tufts that create their own little ecosystems. The rocks rise up in clusters, weathered and solid, dividing the current into channels and eddies. In summer, the water moves lazily around them, reflecting everything—sky, trees, stones—in a shimmering, ever-changing surface.

“Haw Summer” | 8”x10” | Oil on Canvas Panel

Capturing a Feeling, Not Just a Scene

When I set out to paint "Haw Summer," I was working from a photograph I'd taken on the trail, but I knew the painting needed to be about more than accurate representation. It needed to capture that distinctly Southern feeling of a summer day at the river—the warm, humid air that seems to hang around you, the smell of water and green things growing and mud, the sense of peace that comes from being near moving water on a hot day.

Memory became as important as the photograph. I thought about how it feels to stand at the river's edge, the way the heat softens everything, the way time seems to slow down. That feeling guided my choices as much as the reference image did.

The Challenge of Complex Reflections

Water is always tricky to paint, but reflections add another layer of complexity entirely. When you're reflecting a scene with rocks, grasses, trees, and sky—all with different colors and values—the water's surface becomes a kaleidoscope of information. There were moments during this painting when I looked at all those colors showing up in the reflections and thought, "This can't be right. This is too much."

But I made a conscious decision to embrace the complexity rather than simplify it away. Rivers don't reflect things cleanly; they break images up into ripples and patterns, mixing colors in unexpected ways. So I let the reflections be what they were—a little wild, a little unpredictable, full of purples and blues and warm earth tones all dancing together on the surface and beneath it.

The key was not worrying too much about making it feel "realistic" in a photographic sense. Instead, I focused on making it feel true—true to the energy of moving water, true to the way light plays across a river in summer.

Islands of Rock and Grass

One of my favorite details in this painting is the way the grasses frame the left side of the composition, reaching into the scene like they're part of the river itself. These little islands of vegetation are everywhere along the Haw, stubborn and resilient, growing right out of the rocks and holding their ground against the current.

There's something hopeful about that—about things finding a way to grow even in unlikely places, about small bits of life persisting in the middle of moving water.

A Place to Return To

This painting took about six to eight hours over several sessions, using my typical approach of starting with an underpainting and building up layers. But the time I spent with it felt less like work and more like being back at the river itself—observing, remembering, trying to capture not just what the place looks like, but what it feels like to be there.

The Haw River has a way of calming me down, of reminding me that there's always a place to return to when things feel overwhelming. In painting "Haw Summer," I got to spend time with that feeling again, to hold onto it a little longer. And now it's here, on this 8"x10" canvas, ready to bring that same sense of peace to anyone who needs it.

The original of this piece has already sold, but fine art prints are available here.