Angola is a large country in south west Africa with a variety of landscapes and geological features. It has a prominent cliff that cuts across the otherwise flat hilly terrain near the coast. In researching Angola it reminded me of that classic South African movie "The Gods Must be Crazy" where a tribal man finds an empty coca cola bottle and after the elders decide it is a source of evil they send him to dispose of the empty bottle at the end of the world. After a series of misadventures he arrives at a huge cliff with only clouds below and he decides to throw the bottle over. So in the painting I places a likeness of a bottle flying over the cliff in the bottom right. The large flower is from an imbondeiro tree (or baobab tree) the national tree of Angola. The flower only appears for one day per year to help the tree propagate. The elephants are there for scale, these trees can be up to 25 meters high.
I used some of the complimentary colour pairs listed on Handprint.com where MacEvoy painstakingly mapped out all the colour pairs that create perfect greys. In the tree branch is a deep magenta (PV19) mixed with phthalo blue (PB15), and on the cliff face is a deep red (PR179) mixed with a deep green (PG7). They definitely go well together. I also used a lot of indo yellow (PY110) and tangerine orange (PO62) maybe a little too much! The stamen is french ultramarine and sennelier yellow. For the composition I went for a Hiroshige-inspired foregrounded element, the flower and branch, which puts the viewer (you) sitting at the top of a 25 meter imbondeiro tree!
5 x 7 " cold press watercolour, April 2020
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