After the flood and after the burn

Sometimes a painting is done in minutes, other times it practically moves in, takes your comfortable chair and puts its feet up on the cat. WildFires was one of the latter and this is so much one of the first that there’s only one photo.

This is the same landscape with the same bridge sketched in using a stylus. But this time, instead of fire, there’s a desert and the figure – one of the same figures as in the first painting – is shown here standing in what was the river bed, surrounded by the same hills and valleys but with no foliage, no greenery, and no observable life to speak of.

I’m using water-soluble oils again, this time in a much more dilute form but disciplined as to their spread. For ideas about the colours and the way hills, valleys and rocks work, I went to a photograph of the surface of Mars and took from that also the flat dead sky.

The red streak top third was one of those happy accidents and a consequence of not cleaning my brushes properly. The canvas is 50x40cm.