Lindos St Pauls Bay – 101.6 x 76.2 cm – Acrylic on Canvas. 2015.
Lindos, St Pauls Bay is a continuation of my colour field paintings, with a figurative portrait subject. This time, I experimented with my painting methods more fully.
After completing my recent self portrait, I became conscious of knowing when stop working up the level of the paintings detail and to put the brushes down. For this piece of work I was determined to allow my mark making to be more gestural and not to overwork the paint onto the canvas, leaving some of the base surface colour visible. Put simply; to try and adopt a one brush stroke approach.
The composition is from a photograph I took on a beach in Greece - the figure is predominantly in shade, with highlights of bounce light from the surroundings. The background is a bright cyan sky and the familiar Mediterranean turquoise sea. The yellow tone worked well with those of the skin and the colour field background areas. This helps maintain a more abstract colour palette. I felt that the pose of the model was so strong, that it could hold the bright colours and I remember the temperature on the beach in the middle of the day being searingly hot, and after doing a series of experiments, I decided to have the base colour on the canvas a light, but vivid lemon yellow carried this intensity of heat. This yellow surrounds the figure, and projects forward the message of a bold, confident pose. The skin being a cooler, and in terms of tone and shade darker, keeps the figure grounded spatially within the composition, although the it appears to floats in front of the bright colours in the background, giving it a abstracted, stylised look.
Instead of just one expanse of colour, I added more detail splitting the background into three main regions, by abstracting the sky, distant hills and sea. Given the lower vantage point of the viewer, the painting needs these shapes to give the composition context and perspective. The suggestion of an umbrella at the top left of the painting, is a reminder and subtle hint of reality.
I think this is an effective interplay between a dimensionless colour field and a more figurative subject. In my eyes the most successful aspect of the painting is drawing the viewer’s eye upwards to the subjects face. The face is reduced in size due to foreshortening, by looking upwards across the body with a hands on hips pose, conveys a strong confident stance, yet an intriguing calm gaze off into the distance.
