Stormy Sunset

Stormy Sunset was painted from memory rather than from life. I had been out on the water off Whidbey Island when the weather turned, and by the time I was back in the studio the light had changed twice over. What stayed with me was not the storm. It was the seam — the narrow band where the sun found a gap in the cloud and laid a strip of gold across water that was still moving like slate. The surface went on over about six weeks, knife-worked and wet into wet, each pass left to dry only partly before the next. The sky is the thickest part of the painting; in places it stands close to a quarter of an inch off the linen. That was not a decision about texture. It was the only way I could get the cloud to hold light from the inside rather than on the surface, which is how it had held it that afternoon. The greens arrived last. I had the sea grey for most of the painting and it was accurate and completely dead. Dropping viridian and a little cadmium yellow into the troughs gave the water somewhere to go, and the whole canvas turned over in an afternoon. It is a small painting for the amount of sky in it. I wanted the horizon low enough that someone standing close would feel the weather arriving rather than watch it from the shore.