Changing Tides

This is a painting that I created of a small fishing village which I visited a number of years ago in Nova Scotia. I worked on this piece as part of a live painting at Toronto's Artist Project. For me I wanted to experiment with a few things. I used a very thick base of paint to give the painting a significant amount of texture. You can see this particularly in the upper part of the canvas. I also wanted the focal point of the painting to be the concept of two forces being applied to the landscape. Visually, the sun and the moon both appear in the picture. But is it an early morning sunrise or late in the evening sunset? I also was thinking about how the moon affects the tide, which is always constantly changing. As a larger idea, I wanted to the piece to represent how there are different forces always influencing us, some being positive and some negative. One other very interesting thing was that when I finished the painting, and was looking at it under a certain light, the texture in the upper left of the canvas looked like an angel floating in the sky; can you see it? The more I thought about it, I also was thinking that perhaps this really was meant to be: perhaps there is a higher power judging our actions and influencing our decisions to do good or bad deeds. One other interesting thing about this painting is that a few weeks after finishing it, I brought it on the set of a TV interview that I was doing. After leaving the set, I received a call from the host of the show who loved the painting. I ended up dropping the painting off at his house and had a chance to spend more time with him and meet his family!

Size: 48x48