Saturday, April 3, 2010

SUNRISE ON THE ATLANTIC By Cecelia Lyden


This is my last seaside painting for a while. I did 9 of them, large and small. It's time I looked for other subject matter.
This is one of the many spectacular sunrises I photograhed this winter. I have never painted a sunrise or sunset, even though, living on the Hudson River, facing west, I saw beautiful sunsets almost every night. As breathtaking as they are, I always considered them gaudy. But I just had to paint at least one. I approached it like an abstract color field type of painting and just went for it. Using my photograph to keep the color as close as possible to the actual scene, I mixed my colors, wet the canvas and swept the paint across it, trying to mimic the movement I saw in the sky.
I noticed that the foreground in the above image appears darker than my painting. I did suggest some light hitting edges, but my camera and the transfer to the blog did not pick it up.