I work in a sliver of year when the light never quite shuts off. Midsummer in Sweden: the sun sets at eleven and comes back at three, and in between the sky just glows. That window is what I am after.
This one has a birch and a jetty because a completely empty lake would lose people. But look at where they sit. Low. The birch takes up maybe eight percent of the canvas. Everything else is sky and the lake it spills into.
The aurora is poured, not painted
I do not use a brush for the light. I pour thinned acrylic in pale gold and cold blue, tilt the canvas, let it run. Then magenta and green on top while it is still wet. The colours move into each other the way light actually moves at that latitude – no hard edge, no gradient you could plot on a wheel.
The one place I stop the flow: where the sky meets the water. That line has to be sharp or the whole piece goes soft. So I tape it, pull the tape the second the paint goes tacky, and the reflection clicks into place.
Birch Alone at Solstice is available here, printed on heavyweight matte paper that holds the subtlety of the poured layers without glare.
Ruby called it calm drama, which is exactly right
One of the critics – Ruby, writing about the object – said the acrylic clouds “ripple with the aurora” and called it calm drama. That is the only pair of words I have read that names what I am trying to do. The sky is not peaceful. It is not busy either. It is both, which is what solstice light actually feels like if you stand in it long enough.
Charlotte liked it for coastal and cabin homes, and I will take that. But it works anywhere someone wants a window that does not look out at the street.
The birch is there so you know the scale
If I left the birch out, a person reading the piece would assume the lake was small – a pond, maybe. The tree tells you it is not. That sliver of trunk says: this water is wide, this sky is high, you are looking at something that takes fifteen minutes to walk across.
The jetty does the same job. One grey line, three planks visible, just enough to say a person could stand here. Without it, the piece is just abstraction. With it, it is a place.
For: Anyone who wants more sky on the wall than anything else. Not for: spaces that already feel cold, or anyone who needs the focal point to be a thing rather than a colour.
Gallery-wrapped canvas, in 3 sizes — 12×16, 16×20, 18×24 in. Ships free within the continental US.
