Firelight

Original Sold

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This painting has quite a story. I’ve written a whole post about it so I won’t repeat it all here. Briefly, I started it on a trip to Kauai in 2013 then abandoned it until early in 2015 when I realized it needed a color scheme change. What was mostly red turned into a lot more pink and orange, making me much happier.

Then in November 2015 it went through an entire background transplant, requiring lifting the dark background that I’d started with and putting in leaves and “light bubbles.” This meant using gouache – since I’d lost the white of the paper – to paint the leaves in the upper right. This gave me a whole fresh appreciation for the way watercolor on clean white paper transmits luminosity. I so love this medium!

I finished it on the second day of 2016 – over two and a half years since starting it. And in doing so, I’ve no longer got any in-progress paintings awaiting my attention in the studio – at one point there were four of them! It seems some pieces of work just have their own timeline. The name for this one, like the one before it – Juicyfruit – simply came to me, without any apparent meaning. “Firelight” just sounded right.

April 2013 – January 2016 – 22″x30″ – Watercolor on paper