We spent our summer vacation in Cape Cod this year and stayed at our friend's house in Bourne. MA. A short walk from the house the broken bridge crosses over the inlet. This bridge has been there for over a hundred years, and at some point Grover Cleveland spent time here during his presidency.
Being the bridge was built from actual rocks the natural surfaces allowed me alot of expression in how I detailed the stones. My initial intention was to use heavy impasto work on the rocks and have them three dimensionally pop off the canvas. After painting the sky and water, I decided against this - I think my reasoning was the sunrise created a focal point and having something too abstract might deter from this.
Lately I've been doing alot of experimenting with clouds. I think the clouds in the broken bridge painting are my best effort so far. I did these by masking out several geometric shapes with tape. After this I painted the sky in hundreds of vertical bands that descended onto the sunrise. When I lifted the tape and began painting the clouds, I used the same colors as I did for the rest of the sky, but I used horizontal lines to contrast the vertical bands of the sky. This along with the white outlines provided good, but not overpowering definition for the clouds.
This work will soon be hanging at my friend's home on Cape Cod. I can now look forward to painting more works inspired by hundreds of pictures we took during our vacation.
I agree and love the way you did the clouds! Too cool that Grover Cleveland was there too. It's always interesting to hear bits of info on the places that are in paintings.
ReplyDelete