Reflections

Reflections  
10" x 20" - acrylic on canvas 

Can you tell what you are looking at in this painting? When I first showed it to my husband I had to explain the viewpoint. It's based on a detail from a photo I took a few years ago when visiting friends in Victoria, on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. One weekend we drove up towards Nanaimo and I snapped photos of the 'views' outside the car windows, hoping for something that I could paint once home. Here is one of the photos that seemed to have some potential (despite the flat light) as it contained the landscape elements I seem to favour: trees, marsh-wetlands and sky.

This photo always seemed to have some potential and I have returned to it several times since then and started paintings, but nothing really worked. Last week, however,  the 'stars aligned' and I found the right detail and the work came together quickly. I love the intense colours and the stylized and abstracted shapes of the landscape elements. I did wonder about the symmetrical balance but think it works because of the line of small orange shapes above the central orange focal area. These shapes then move the eye out towards the two larger clumps of trees, and then back to the large orange area in the middle. Any thoughts?

As I love the idea of working with one image over and over, I may tackle this one again - maybe even today. Have a good one!