Strange Summer Light (watercolor painting)

For a few minutes on a July afternoon, just before clouds thickened and thunder rolled, the light  across Lake Champlain became very strange-- a sort of luminous, saturated, high-contrast mistiness that suffused the sky and water and shore in and around Burlington Bay.
 I stopped and made this very quick watercolor from the sea-wall at Blanchard Beach. I used very light washes contrasted with dark dry-brush pigments. I had to do a lot of scraping down to bare paper in an attempt to capture the crazy brightness that hit the sails and some places on the water.- KMB

Afternoon, Before a Summer Storm, Lake Champlain- Painting by  Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper, July 29, 2015.