Lancashire Sunset

Today’s painting was inspired by a photo by a guy called Brandon Lee Keefe of a sunset from St Peter’s Church in Hersham.  I say inspired rather than based on because I had to add some land on the horizon where my sea and sky kept blending together.

It’s in my favourite key of triadic left, with the main three colours being Prussian blue, Indian yellow and quinacridone magenta.  At one point I tried some sepia for those shadowy grooves in the foreground but didn’t like how it ended up, so washed most of it away.  There may be some residual sepia in there but apart from that, this is a three colour painting.

In many ways, the painting looks good but I know it could have been much better.  The sky was much brighter at one point but I went over it too many times.  The problem was that pair of  that strange marks in the top right corner.  I tried to disguise them as birds but the birds were too big and too distracting.  I tried to wash them out but with Prussian blue being a stainer, that didn’t work, so I found myself having to redo lots of the sky darker than before.  And you can see how that’s resulted in a hard edge in the bottom right of the sky.

The sea’s also muddier than intended on the right of the painting.   I was a bit impatient today, starting on the foreground too soon and finding it bleeding into the sea.  I was too lazy to grab some kitchen roll so just brushed the bleeds into the sea, resulting in something looking a bit muddy.  I had the same problem with sea and sky but added some land on the horizon to cover up my problems.

Actually, while I remember, I was probably impatient because I was painting this sitting on the floor, getting some practice in just in case I make it onto Landscape Artist Of The Year as a wildcard.  It’s not that comfortable.

And then there’s the foreground.  It doesn’t blaze with light as much as I wanted to and there’s not as much red, yellow and blue showing within the neutral rocky colour as I wanted.  Those grooves also look weird in a “what the hell are they?” way but I was expecting that to be the case.  It’s just a shame that there’s not enough dazzling colour in the rest of the painting to distract from them.

Overall, if you’d not seen Brandon’s photo and/or not known what I wanted this painting to look like, then I guess this is a passable painting.  It might look even better if it was cropped off on the right so that the sun is about one third of the way across the painting from left to right.  Anyway, when I look at it, I dream about what could have been.  This painting is in the private collection of a Scottish art collector.