I’ve been figuring out the shapes of the architecture within which the girls stand; a circular setting made of marble sunk into the ground, surrounded by cherry trees in the raised planters. Getting the curves of the stone was interesting work, with multiple vanishing points to complicate things and weird foreground and background problems to solve. I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got at this point, but I want to sleep on it, then see how it looks tomorrow before I start painting it. It doesn’t make good photographs as it is, so I’ve not posted any here, but when I commit to the shapes I’ll paint this structural work in whites before marbling it all, then show how it looks. I’ve made the structure reminiscent of a labyrinth, suggesting that the girls have found their way to the centre.
I’ve used the golden section as the horizon line for a strip of ocean above the back wall, echoing those lovely compositions by Alma-Tadema with a rich blue sky filling the top half of the composition, while the lower half is white. Following the white theme in the bottom half the girls are going to wear white dresses with touches of colour. In front of the blue sky I’m planning to paint lots of pink cherry blossom, in complete contrast to the Angel of Death, no?
