Highway 20

Driving to Sutton earlier this month, I was scouting out potential locations where I could get a good view of the highway. From the vantage point of the car, I could easily see where the potential openings were to make a painting. Today I went to one of those spots, a grassy hillside situated beside the U Haul depot, near the construction project that will one day link the 138 to the 20. The hillside was alive with yellow wild flowers and magenta blossoms from the burr plants. There was no garbage on this small nook of untouched nature. The view was awesome- highway 20 under construction for as far as you could see in either direction. I fixated on this angle because of the pleasing contours of the highways, ramps and bridges, along with the rolling green hills and wooded areas that seemed to arise from the concrete and asphalt. To paint the cars I went with a 'marsh mellow on wheels' approach, and finished the painting with as many orange cones as possible. I used bismuth yellow (extremely bright and opaque) with benzimida orange (also opaque scarlet orange) to make the traffic cone colour, and overlaid it on the nearly dry painting. It started to rain shortly after I finished, what luck. 6 x 7.5" cold press, watercolour, July 2020