I’m a Sucker for Sunsets

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Somehow, wherever I go, I end up with many (I mean many) pictures of sunsets.  There is something about the vibrant colors that just gets to me and says “paint me, paint me.”

But the problem is, what I often then paint is not abstract, because I seem to just paint what I see, and that is a real sunset, not an abstract one.  And what I want to do is paint an abstract sunset.  Aargh!!!

So, a friend recently came back from Socotra with some great photographs (she’s a very good photographer), including several sunsets.  I decided to do a representational painting of one sunset, and then try to create an abstract of the same photo.

Well, I haven’t been doing too many representational paintings lately and I’m a little out of practice.  It took me three tries to be happy with a painting of her Socotra sunset.

Socotra Sunset

So, I finally had a representational version I liked.  But now came the really hard part: abstracting it. Two tries later I had something I liked. It’s actually painted on the back of one of my earlier failed Socotra paintings. (I do that a lot:  if something doesn’t work, I just turn the paper over and start painting on the other side.)

Socotra II

I’m happy with Socotra II, but I’m going to keep trying … maybe bigger.  Who knows?