Ricky Sears Art News: The one about the colors in the clouds

Sunset I South, March 8, 2014, 4 x 4 inches, oil on canvas

Clouds of Color
I've been completing a painting at sunset each day for the past 4 days and plan to continue to over the remaining evenings during spring break from Northern Virginia Community College where I teach.

I tell my students to identify the colors in the clouds, like Colin Firth in "The Girl with A Pearl Earing" and I have realized that I am interested in seeing the colors rendered in paint. Seeing it visualized by my students will be interesting, but I am obviously very interested in this since it is a prompt I keep assigning to students I have this semester in painting and drawing.

My wife Helén and I live on the Eastern Shore of Maryland on a property with a fantastic view west that affords us spectacular sunsets just about every day. I have been moved by these and the urge to photograph them is nothing like the urge I have to translate what is seen into paint.


A photo I took that captures the colors in the clouds

I like how it's blurred to emphasize how colors change within each cloud and also in the sky from overhead toward the horizon. But I present this for illustration purposes only, I don't work from photographs for this exercise, I work from observation at a french easel I carry to and from the studio.

The Gap
Authors David Bayles and Ted Orland write in their inspiring text Art and Fear,
"making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do and what you did.”

In painting a sunset a day, not only am I faced with a challenge to work quickly to render what is a fleeting effect of light on the sky and clouds, but I am having to meet my desire to see the idea actualized. I have the aspiration to render the sky - or what I rather consider clouds of color - and the achievement is thrilling because there is no gap in this exercise. I have a goal and I meet it daily. The paintings are each approximately 4 x 4 inches. And I complete them in about 10 minutes.