oil on canvas, 36″ x 48″
This painting has been a journey. Three months and at least a dozen different versions, tried out, painted over, and tried again. This is as ‘done’ as I want to do.
It’s a larger canvas than I’m accustomed to, I wanted to make a BIG landscape, focused on the sun setting behind me, casting light on the opposite ridge. I worked from two photos, making a composite landscape between foreground and background.
In the end, I was less interested in capturing perfect light and color as to render a mood. As the sun sets, and you are camped, perhaps finishing dinner and drinking a cup of tea (or from a flask). The sun disappears to the west but continues to cast bright warm light on the opposite ridge. This is a magical moment. What also happens is the sun’s warmth goes away, pretty much immediately. The sun really is amazing and wondrous. I can’t look directly at it or we burn our retinas (it will make us blind), I can’t be exposed to it for long or my skin will burn. It will evaporate water and dry you out until you are mummified. And yet, we can’t live without it. The balance is sooooo so delicate between scorching and incinerating, life-giving, and cold dark ice planet. At sunset, you become acutely aware of that threadbare balance – squinting at the setting sun as it limns the horizon, casting about dazzling color and alpenglow, then giving way to darkness and chilling your bones.
I went through quite the journey on this painting, as it went through a dozen revisions at least. Sometimes I gave up on it as a straight landscape and incorporated other elements, then painted over them. You can see several of them below. Were they ‘better’ than where this ended up? Maybe! But it was devolving into overthinking, and to come to the point of ‘done’ I needed to just find a place to rest with the result, and the final painting (image above) does that for me.
