Today I worked on darkening the sky to the right of the clouds, the sea and the island. I’m not even close to completing the sea and I really must go and look at the ocean, but this is a good base for the next layers. I don’t recall having ever painted a sea before.
Â
The sky is coming together nicely. I used some ivory black mixed with ultramarine blue to darken it, then used a rag to shape the edges and lift of excess paint so the layer became a patchy glaze. I added some Naples yellow highlights to the clouds and the edges of the island landscape where the setting sun would hit them and painted a discrete New York city skyline. I hope the city isn’t going to grab too much attention, and kept it pretty low-key, but it should add to a sense of uneasiness and impending disaster because the clouds come from that source which is burned into the collective imagination of every American.
Â
Â
I’m still thinking about the people jumping from the World Trade Center and and this is colouring my work on this painting, probably a result of reading Jonathon Safran Foer’s splendid novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” last year. Images of a falling figure became a shocking feature of that narrative and got deeply under my skin. I’m not entirely sure why this should become the underlying theme of the piece, but it has taken over.
