Jet

I painted this location a number of years ago and called it "Main Street" which actually didn't reflect the architecture of a typical Main Street in in US Towns. This is the same location but from the opposite viewpoint and keeping the vapour trail and the red brick foreground building. "Main Street" was in my Roadside America series which was generally a bit unfocused and delved often into the genre of Americana but this painting unbeknownst to me would be the precursor to this current series that has morphed from Roadside America into Roadside Apocalypse. I will write more about this in a separate post as there is too much to include in this post.
Broadly speaking although all the pictures in Roadside Apocalypse are at locations in present-day America, I have chosen architecture that was common in Cold War era times when the threat of The Bomb pervaded life below the surface. The clouds are ordinary storm clouds but put into the context of deserted streets and a vapour trail high in the sky they take on the attributes of a nuclear explosion...or to another viewer maybe it's just a picture of a storm cloud in Oklahoma.
The sky was painted in a one-day session as I find if I spend too much time on clouds they start to look heavy and overpainted and is nice to keep the spontaneous brush marks in place wherever possible. 
The painting is based around a blue/orange complementary trying to put the blue of the sky into the other colours in the landscape such as the greens so as to try and keep the colours harmonious.
30" x 20" oil on linen.
There is a step-by-step progress through this painting in previous posts on this blog.