Embers of an Evening

what an absolute feast of colour this one became. I love colour — in case that hadn't already become painfully obvious — and this painting gave me permission to use rather a lot of it. The original photograph was taken looking down from Brighton Palace Pier onto the beach at low tide. It's a view I've always loved: tiny figures scattered across that enormous expanse of wet sand, while the last of the sunlight hits the sea and seems to bounce straight back at you. I played with the original image quite a bit to make it work for me, and painting it on a square canvas changed the composition more than I'd expected. With my wider canvases, I naturally tend to make the eye travel across the painting. Here, everything could happen at once — the enormous sky, that blazing sun, the sweep of the water and those tiny people disappearing into the distance. Then there was the colour. Somewhere along the way, the foreground almost accidentally developed the colours of a Pride flag — reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues and violets all running through the wet sand. But then, this is Brighton. Colour rather suits us. The long shadows came quite late. I might have been slightly more restrained with them if I did it again, but I love what they ultimately gave the painting: suddenly you can feel exactly how low that sun is. Every figure points you back towards that fierce little source of light on the horizon. A few tiny touches of impasto brought the glare back out, some oil pastel helped those colours bleed and shimmer across the beach... And then I made myself stop Acrylic & oil pastel on deep-edge canvas 74 × 74 cm High-gloss lacquer finish