Girl Playing in the Tide

This was the painting that I created and sold at the auction with a little help from Matt Stanton Beard for the Trinidad Coastal Land trust 40th anniversary celebration! It was a fun celebration with great food, lots of good peeps and the perfect party music by “The Sand Fleas”. 

Several of us took turns on another painting that was set up next to the band, tapping each other out when we thought we had an idea for what it needed next. Pretty fun! It evolved into a sunset scene with rocks and stylistic waves.

This piece in the photo was another of my attempts at putting figures into the landscape. Initially I had her father standing to the right, waiting, but he looked kinda creepy, so I scraped him off and let her swim unsupervised instead. Another thing that was interesting, was after the encouragement from Matt, I scraped off the two foreground rocks and repainted them darker to make them pop forward in space. I just painted them quickly and unselfconsciously and it seemed to work a lot better than before. I think Matt also lightened my Trinidad head mass in the far background when I wasn’t looking, which helped the depth as well.

The effect is termed “atmospheric perspective” for those of you who haven’t been indoctrinated in the science behind creating landscape paintings. As items are further away from the eye, they tend to get lighter and cooler, due to having to look through layers of atmosphere. 

Thanks to Jim for being the top bidder of the night!