Santa Bárbara Castle, Spain

Alicante is a Spanish city on the coast of the Mediterranean, it is one of the places I visited in the 1998 trip that I have talked about a lot on this blog.... I did somewhere close to 200 paintings on that trip and have been posting them every now and then, at least the good ones! This one was painted shortly before I traveled southward, to Granada where I made several paintings at Alhambra. The name of the castle is the Santa Bárbara Castle, you see it perched atop the mountain. I had walked up the mountain along a winding road and done a few paintings from the top, there is one other painting showing the view from the castle, where the people on the beach look like little ants.

Being able to paint light and shadow is absolutely key when doing landscapes. The shadows are often more difficult for an artist to capture properly, usually due to the use of black paint to depict the shadow. Unless you are are going for a fauvism, cubism, or other highly abstract approach then i would not recommend using black at all. If you look at the building in the lower center of the paining, there are two great examples of how colourful, and 'full of light' a shadow can be. On the left wall, there is a V-shaped highlight of a sunbeam, it is surrounded by a warm sandy shadow.....on the right wall the shadow is a cool purplish shade. So how can shadows on the same building be so different? It is because on the left shadow, the warm sunbeam is spilling light into the shadow. On the right shadow, there is not sub beam nearby, so the shadow is reflecting the sky, and probably the cool Mediterranean sea, which is just behind where I was sitting. So next time you are walking around, just study shadows a bit and you will see that they can be full of light!

5x7"  cold press 1998