This is a painting I did on location in Barbados during a trip I took when I was a graduate student. The word on the boat 'Bajan" is actually the phrase used to describe the local people. Prior to this one, my paintings in Barbados had not captured the light an colour properly, when I showed them to some local people they said that it was not colourful enough! So in this painting I amplified the colours and tried to really bring out the lights and shadows. Notice how the shadow under the boat is charged with green. From then on the work really looked spectacular and captured the essence of the location.
The key to making a painting colourful is to guess what? Use lot's of colour, pure, unmixed paint directly from the tube. Usually I mix my colours a lot, three, four, five different colours in each mix, but in this painting I tried to keep the mixtures simple. The grass looks like a combination of Winsor or lemon yellow (PY175), phthalo green bs (PG7) and french ultramarine (PB29). The water was a similar mix but more blue, and a light-yellow fade. The sky as usual was cereulean blue (PB35), I pretty much use that no matter where I am painting. But the real trick was to open myself up to the surroundings. allow the warmth and the sun to travel through my body and into the painting. Once you can get rid of your per-conceived notions about what something is supposed to look like, and just paint what you see and feel, then you are a landscape painter.
Bajan Boat, Oistins, Barbados, cold press watercolour, 5 x 7" 2001 (No. 1161)
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