This painting was done on a mountain-on-top-of-the-mountain, in Colorado Park, just when you think you have gone as far up as you can go, there is a long winding road leading to this park. When you get out to walk, there is yet another grassy hill that you continue walking up until you reach a gazebo over looking the west and east side views of the mountain. The view shows the west bank of a large gorge that runs down the side of the mountain, at the bottom of the gorge is a torrent river, the river is not seen in the picture, but it would be just about where my signature ends in the bottom right. The city depicted is St. Denis, and the sea and beach can be just barely seen... the misty clouds were creating a real fog that came and went as I painted.
Depicting a city on this scale can be quite challenge, the size of this paper is only 5x7 inches, so you don't have a lot of space to paint every little window. I concentrated on keeping the egg-shell white and soft red colours very prominent, these were the colours of most of the houses, and then I put in a but of detail to suggest windows, you have to zoom in to catch them. The trees between the houses provided a dark contrast to make the off whites stand out. To maintain the illusion of distance, I kept the colour saturation (brightness) high in the foreground (edge of the mountain on left), and kept the colour saturation low in the city and water, including lots of blue there to give the atmosphere some depth, a classic trick invented by Da Vinci.
5x7" cold press, 2011
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