Sunrise in Abstract

Knives are a fun tool for acrylic painting particularly when using the wet-on-wet technique. Paints can be dragged across the canvas to create interesting mixtures that allow for optical blending that might otherwise take hours of work with a brush.

I started Sunrise at the horizon with the lighter color and then worked upward and downward into the darker colors. By using minimal strokes I was able to keep the colors clean yet achieved the highlights in the sky. The trick to brilliant highlights when working wet-on-wet is to gradually make the knife strokes lighter and lighter to avoid moving the darker paint layer underneath. Seems like an obvious thing but took me a while to discover this for myself!

Sunrise, Acrylic on 300lb watercolor paper, 11"x14", $70 (unframed)

Day's End

Sunsets are always fun to paint because they offer an opportunity to play around with colors to heart's content. When I was into photography some years ago, sunsets were my favorite topic. Waiting and watching to capture the exact moment on film had an educational side to it that I only realized years later when I started painting. The stages of an evolving sunset -- the unpredictable inter-play of light, clouds, wind and atmospheric temperature, and the final moments to the climactic scene -- became so familiar that my very first painting was a sunset. Sadly, it turned out to be a hideous caricature of colorful blobs on canvas. I am not sure I even have it any more!

Marsh Sunset is inspired by various photographs I took of sunsets and marshes when we lived in Connecticut. The paints are applied thinly and it took several glazes to get the colors right where I was satisfied with them.

Marsh Sunset, Acrylic on Canvas Board, 16"x20", $120 (framed)

Humble Inspiration

Some years ago while I was living in Michigan, every day I would drive by a patch of country road that went through swampland that had been created as a result of housing developments all around. Hardwood trees that had died from waterlogging still stood tall and majestic, now home to woodland birds and other creatures.

A mental sketch of those swampy scenes has hung around in memory and was the source for Dead Woodland. There is nothing special about the technique here, although I was able to use my (only) recently refined skill in the use of the liner brush to create the tree branches.

Dead Woodland, Acrylic on canvas board, 16"x20", $100 (unframed)