Beautiful Grey

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Winter Beach

A space usually full of colour and vitality now lies fallow.
It’s desolate here; the wind is fierce and the sand is hard.
A grim picture of grey awaits wanton wanderers.
No families dance here now,
their laughter has been drowned by the waves.
There’s a solemn beauty about the deserted shore,
like an abandoned fairground,
always graciously hoping for another chance to entertain.
But that’s the paradox of the beach in winter.
Its annual renaissance is never far away and
its sober silence sits astride a confidence of more glory forthcoming.
Vibrancy will return to the sands and so too will the laughter.

-Robert Siney

Sunset in a Cup

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10″x8″ oil on panel
These little sunset paintings remind me of Emily Dickinson’s line:
“Bring me the sunset in a cup”
I love how they are portable reminders of something so vast.

Wave Watchers

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I started with an acrylic under painting in 2 values. I scraped ochre, and violet thinly on with a palette knife, leaving the white canvas to make a third value. Then I mixed some big puddles of paint, and painted fast, waiting for the figures way down on the beach to get into position. I captured them with a few strokes each, cleaning up my mess using the negative space around them.

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27 min sunset

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I quickly spread a warm, orange-rose underpainting where I saw all the warms. I used acrylic and a palette knife, and was playing with the shape and design of the composition. I wished, as I was painting the sunset, I would have covered the whole canvas, or perhaps put a different color under the non-warm section because I love the way thick paint skips over the heavy textured canvas, and the white skips left something to be desired.