An unconventional view

 

You're looking at the wall of the living room of the unfussy vacation rental I'm in, and on it, the brilliant light streaming in from the sunset tonight.  I was looking out at the sunset from the patio, but once I came inside to get some water and I saw this on the wall, it was a beacon of orange clarity.  Sunsets are miracles, every single one of them, but their ubiquity is the reason you can glaze over when you see too many.  How many times have you seen a living room wall lit up like that?  Ok, that's what I want to paint.  How and if I get there is a whole other matter! But it bears thinking about.  (Note the book A Giacometti Portrait by James Lord on the table, I'm thinking about that too.  And I can't stop thinking about Spring Cannot Be Cancelled by David Hockney, which I read a few months ago.)

In the meantime, the some of the greatest painting challenges came today from stairs.  These are not, by far, the steepest stairs I've taken to get to the top or bottom of a cliff, this is just today's version.

Well worth tackling, even as I carried my too-heavy bag (note to self:  bring primaries and mix your colors  -- for your beach studies, you don't need cobalt blue and ultramarine blue and sky blue and cerulean blue etc etc even if Holbein and M.Graham and Turner all make these colors!). 

I ended up on a beach with a tall obelisk shaped rock in the ocean smack in the middle between two cliff walls.  And there, on the sand, directly opposite that rock, was a flat rock shaped like a painter's bench.  Symmetry ruled the day.  I wanted to simplify my shapes and work on the wet vs dry value of the paint.  I had a blissful time on the beach, and ended up with another warm up painting to be revisited.