Blue Haven
Status of Original Painting – Sold
All prices are in Canadian dollars
Size: 13.25 x 20 inches
Price: $1,000
Medium: Watercolour on 300 lb Arches
Description:
Here’s another sea stack along the rocky coast of Newfoundland, near Bay Bulls. I like this for the natural lighting effects, the peaceful setting, and the unusual colors.
This was very challenging for me to paint and took far longer than I’d anticipated. I try to achieve life-like realism in all my work, but there’s something about the purple, pink, and blue that seemed unrealistic. Those colors fought me along the way. Also I was working at times in natural light and at other times in artificial light, with the consequence that both the reference photo and the painting looked very different between the lighting conditions. This happens when there’s a lot of blue in a painting. The dominant color would go from blue to purple and back again, and I’d see things that disappeared when the lighting changed. I’d leave it thinking I had a largely purple or mauve painting underway, and then come back to find it mostly blue, or vice versa. And then when the water was added, everything changed again, because adjacent colors change how you perceive any single color.
I was at a loss for what to title this, but my friend Lisa Dawe came through with the excellent suggestion of “Blue Haven.”