If you’ve ever wandered the Hudson Valley at that precise hour when the light softens and the landscape seems to inhale—those fleeting pinks, those long prairie-like greens, the sky widening like a held breath—you’ve already stepped into the world Andrea M. Park paints. “Cloudy With a Chance of Memory,” her new solo exhibition at the Ulster County Habitat for Humanity ReStore, gathers these moments with the quiet clarity of someone who’s been paying attention for decades.
Park’s landscapes—many painted on-site, others distilled later from sketches and the atmospheric residue of recollection—are less about topographical accuracy than about light’s talent for summoning feeling. In her canvases, the Hudson Valley returns not as a technical rendering but as a sensation: the first shimmer on the water at Esopus Meadows; the soft horizon of Olana at dusk; the low, insistent thrum of the Rail Trail’s long green corridor. Even indoors they read as plein air—the brushwork loose and embodied, the color fields anchored in observation but warmed by memory.
Born in British Columbia and long settled in the Valley, Park brings design training, botanical illustration, and decades of landscape study to her practice, yet the work doesn’t flaunt its technical pedigree. (She is Canadian, after all.) Instead, it hums with a kind of modest confidence: a belief that if you follow color and light long enough, they’ll lead you to something true. Her paintings—oil and gouache alike—register that truth in gradients of sky, in the careful modulation between water and shore, in the way light leaks across a pasture just before evening.
It’s fitting that this exhibition lands at Habitat’s ReStore, a place where the region’s material afterlives—chairs, cabinets, windows, tools—wait patiently to begin again. Park has been a longstanding supporter of Habitat’s mission, and the sense of community stewardship embedded in her work makes the pairing feel almost inevitable. A portion of sales will support Habitat’s continued effort to build affordable homes in Ulster County, an increasingly urgent undertaking.
“Painting is my play,” Park writes in her artist statement—a line that feels both simple and exact. You see that play in the joy of her skies, in the looseness of her marshes, in the generous way she lets the viewer linger in her landscapes without rushing them toward meaning.
The exhibition opens Saturday, December 6, from 2:30–4:30pm at Ulster County Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore at 406 Route 28 in West Hurley. The exhibition continues through December 31.
