Director's Commentary

Here's a play-by-play of how this latest painting unfolded.


I started out with a red and yellow ground and built up some arbitrary pockets of colour. Originally, I envisioned the buildings on either side to be depicted in a highly realistic manner but I quickly strayed from that idea. Probably because the research requirements and time restrictions were cramping my style. But I like the monolithic look that I ended up with.


After shading in the walls, I turned my eye to the sea. This was one of those paintings where I got so caught up in the actual process of moving the paint on the canvas that it took me a while to step back and realise that it just didn't look that good. This is definitely pre-epiphany. The colours are so muddy and uncohesive and that pthalo green sticks out like a sore thumb.


At this point I was concerned with revamping the tonal qualities of the piece. I painted over a lot of the darker areas with ultramarine blue. I'd say this was probably the turning point since that change ended up characterising the entire thing.


After going back and looking a lot more closely at Tomory Dodge's work, I actually began to source my visual material instead of basing it on memory. Hence the vertical textures and cross-hatched areas. Also a bigger alteration in terms of the way the brush strokes actually looked.


The final touches consisted of darkening the shadows and adding in the surfer and sky. I knew I wanted the latter to retain that reddish colour and ended in shading in a crude cloud structure to complement the light-to-dark transitions along the walls. The surfer was a bit tricky and took me a few times but I ended up using a bit more violet in the blacks to subtly make him pop.

That's about it. Sorry if this ended up sounding self-congratulatory and pretentious. But hey, what can you do.