Blinding Light, Brancaster Staithe

 Oil on Board, 10 x 17 inches

I painted this one as a demo to the Castor and Ailsworth Society of Art last Thursday, then finished it off at Patchings Art Festival on Sunday morning. 

The photo below shows the painting as it was after the two hours allotted for the demo, and above the finished article. Really, with such bright light bouncing off the mud (one of my favourite subjects to paint), the painting was an exercise in recognising relative tones. The sky was obviously very bright, but a tone down from the reflected sunlight, and everything else - the distant trees, buildings, banks, mid-distant trees, post, boats and mussel bags, were all progressively darker. 

The initial hook for the painting, apart from that pure sunlight on the mud, was the halo effect of Viridian green on the top of the colourful bags of mussels. And I never tire of trying to capture that transition of the pure sunlight and the darker tones next to it - just so exciting to depict!