Purple Rain

Today’s effort is Purple Rain. I was thinking of doing some sort of blizzard scene as I was in the mood to do a moody sky and to flick paint all over the place. But then a thought came to me in the shower. Why does it have to be white paint flicked everywhere? Why not another colour? And by the time I’d got to washing between my toes, the idea for Purple Rain was born.

The main four colours today were Payne’s grey, French ultramarine, Indian yellow and quinacridone magenta. There’s also some Prussian blue but only in the most distant hills where I wanted to use a cooler blue. And the acrylic inks are there again. Manly earthy red and indigo but with a bit of sepia. Plus, of course, the granulation fluid.

I had some compositional objectives coming in to this painting:

– get lots of different colours into the sky: make it the star of the show

– get the house and the figure at the compositional hotspots, both 2/3rds of the way across with one 1/3rd down and one 2/3rds down.

– get some contrasts going by having some orange (in the sky and roof) right next to some violet

– use the runs from the inks to give the impression of rain running down hills

And I managed to hit the spot on all of them. The worst bit about the painting is the foreground figure and dog. I was too impatient with them and should have waited for everything else to dry properly. On the other hand, it does look like we’re seeing them with rain running down our glasses so some people might like it like that.

This one was a success and has been sold to a former boss and curry fan down in Sussex.