Out the window

Landscape painting of a hilly sunset scene in Oregon, with Mt Hood out the window. My attention was riveted by that odd stick-man thing, like something out of the first season of True Detective. A friend took the photo this was based on, and I just had to paint it.

I feel pretty good about the results. The sky is a little more “bent” in my rendition, but the shapes and the colors really come through the way I intended. It feels good to say there was no cheating involved here. I had to push through some doubts trying to find what colors were going on in that sky – what happens when you mix blue with orange? Green, apparently! With liberal use of unsaturated colors (grays), you don’t really notice it. Color is tricky stuff. I’m not foolish enough to think if this were a human face, I wouldn’t have folded, but progress is progress!

I think that orange in the sky isn’t just a pretty sunset. I think it’s a product of wildfires, orange light reflecting down from the clouds in the west. The impacts of those are visible and tangible from hundreds of miles away.