Sea and Sky

A lot of pictures that I paint are square, but sometimes a subject really can't be contained in such a constrained format, and this sky is one of them.

Mary Kemp. Sea and Sky. 100 x 50 cm. Available

In East Anglia it's all about skies. When you get to the coast it's just a continuation of the landscape. You can sure spend a lot of time looking upwards , observing an ever changing panorama!

Here the pink of the sky was particularly important. When painting I blocked in the clouds over a ground of Venetian red and ultramarine violet, and built up the layers using French ultramarine, cerulean blue, Venetian red and yellow ochre. It's all about the colours! The pink is Venetian red, a little of which goes a long way! For the white I used titanium white with a hint of raw Sienna and cadmium yellow.

Written down it all sounds very simple , but somehow it took me ages.