The Flats

The Flats is a popular swimming spot in which shallow water flows around long flat rocks.

Joyfully alone among strangers who now and then engaged with me in conversations ranging from mundane to worldly, I painted immersed in and using the very waters I was painting, waters receding day by day as the sun dipped below the trees earlier and earlier evening after evening. Saul Jerome E. San Juan https://www.sauljerome.com/

In the evenings around the Summer Solstice of 2021, I painted these watercolors at the area of Barton Creek known as The Flats, a place abuzz with a multitude of Austinites young and old, human and canine, frolicking and relaxing among the rocks and rivulets. It was the beginning of my first summer break as a high school art teacher, a career change that coincided with the onset of the pandemic that thrust many of us into physical isolation necessitating extremely virtual interactions. The summer turned out to be a brief return to carefree exuberance, made warmer and brighter by the cold and darkness we endured in the past year.