One painting is of a distinctive set of trees that Van Slyke always sees as she drives home from Plattsburgh.

“I’m about to come into town and on the right is Northwood Road. Those trees are like a welcoming home,” Van Slyke said. “And I’m sure other people may have noticed that also, but never really thought too much about it.”

Her project, titled “Finding the Ordinary: A Portrait of Everyday Shared Spaces,” was done through a grant from the Adirondack Lakes Center for the Arts. Every week for a year, starting last December, Van Slyke painted one scene in the collection. All 52 paintings will be on exhibit at Heaven Hill Farm December 13 and 14.

“The intention of this body of work is to acknowledge the local community and to portray the simple beauty that tends to be overlooked,” Van Slyke said, reading from the statement she wrote when applying for the grant.

Van Slyke, who has lived in Lake Placid for 43 years, worked as a registered nurse and later an art teacher before deciding to return to school for her MFA. That was about five years ago, and since then she has taken on the academic mindset of focusing on bodies of work, not just individual paintings. She’s always working on more than one thing; in addition to this project, she has also been working on a series of pastel paintings of clouds.

The small paintings are what Van Slyke describes as quick, “imperfect” sketches, mostly done in just two or three hours. She chose locations that she felt represented the community of Lake Placid. Some are more off-the-beaten-path than others, and some were requested by members of the community, like the birch trees on Mirror Lake and the view from Heaven Hill.

“They’re like little snapshots of spots in our community that we share,” Van Slyke said.

She describes her style as focusing on color and light. Many of the paintings were done in person, or plein air. She painted the front of Lake Placid Elementary School from the parking lot, using the back of her car as her work surface. She got some strange looks, but she said painting in plein air is completely different from using a photo for reference.

“It’s more true,” Van Slyke said. “It captures the spirit more in plein air. You have to work really fast, so you have to quickly think about what’s important and what’s not.”

Another plein air painting is of the lacrosse fields, which she did on a windy day as clouds were racing across the sky. She had to paint as fast as possible and finished the painting in about 45 minutes.

Drawing the community

A distinctive feature of the paintings is that most of them have no cars or people in sight. Van Slyke said this is because she wanted to focus on the places.

“If you put people in, then it becomes more specific,” she said. “If you leave them out, then people can find themselves in the spaces or relate to them more.”

For her upcoming show, she hopes that this project will be accessible to people and that it will draw people in, especially families with children. She hopes they are attracted to the paintings because those places mean something to them, too. All of the paintings will be for sale with relatively affordable prices, and she hopes many of them will be taken home.

“I’ve always seen the special places,” she said. At her art show, she hopes fellow Lake Placid residents will see them too.

This project is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by the Adirondack Lakes Center for the Arts.