On first look, this painting may appear monochromatic. In fact, there are many colors, primarily in the clouds which fold in purples and greens and yellows amongst the fluffy white. Often when I look at clouds, I think about how unreal they look; how they look "just like a painting". Trying to create fluffy, luminous clouds requires many layers and much patience.
I mix all my own grays, and the grays of the buildings are specific too: the silhouetted units on top of the roof and the window panes are blue-grays, the opposite on the color wheel from the main part of the building which is mixed from a cadmium orange base. In fact, there's a tiny whisper of orange in the boarded window near the bottom right-hand side of the canvas.
Upon finishing the painting, I realized that something from the pandemic had seeped in - the radiant sky hopeful above the still gray world, as the vaccine became available but, at the time, not yet widely disseminated. My subsequent paintings became brighter in hue, so I think of this painting as a turning point, a shift from feeling stuck to beginning to think about the future again.
- Subject Matter: Urban landscape
- Created: 2021
- Collections: 2020-21: And...