This work was born alongside a Summer Serenade — music that rises and falls, bright as laughter, then hushed as dusk, a rhythm of light and shadow. On the canvas, the Black-eyed Susans echo that movement: one bloom vivid in the foreground, the others drifting into haze, their golden petals dimming against a darkened sky. Blooming in late summer, these flowers already hold the hint of ending within their radiance, a reminder that the season itself is fleeting.

Together, sound and image trace the arc of summer — exuberant yet fragile, radiant yet fading. Joy carries its own shadow; every bloom gestures toward its passing. In this pairing, light and darkness entwine, not as opposites, but as companions in the season’s brief, bittersweet song.