Silent Steps

This piece has heavy texture in places. This texture comes from building up heavy layers of paint, which provides a rich history for the piece, not all of which is always visible. The piece is finished with a coat of Liquitex satin varnish and a cold wax rub, both of which help protect the painting over time. The painting has a satin/matte finish. This piece is framed in a white 12"x12" Cardinali Renewal Core Floater Frame that is 3/4" deep. The frame is screwed into small wooden dowels that have been glued to the back of the wood panel. If you want to replace this frame down the road, you can do so by removing the screws from the back and carefully removing the wood panel from the frame. The back of the frame includes a sawtooth hanger and bumpers at the bottom for hanging the piece. A certificate of authenticity is adhered to the back of the piece using archival-quality adhesive.

My goal with this piece was to create different kinds of color contrast while working with one of the complementary color pairs. I chose orange and blue for this. I often use vermillion and phthalo green, which sit about halfway between the red/green and orange/blue pairs. I used cobalt blue, cad orange, titanium white, and mars black. When mixing complementaries, I tend to skew dark very quickly, and it’s hard for me to steer a too-dark piece back towards the light, so I deliberately kept it on the light side this time. When you mix complementary colors like orange and blue, you end up with shades of brown. I lightened that up to an almost beige color by adding some white, and I used that for much of the scene, adding a little orange here and a little blue there. I used pure cad orange for the large orange shape on the left, a closer rock structure, and a mixture of blue/white/orange for the blue shape on the right, cliffs in the distance that are a cool mirror for the orange shape. I added a little more white to the beige mixture and used that to create light reflections in the wet sand, disrupting the reflections. I added a little bird in the sky and signed it.