Pawn

 The impetus for this came from the distant rain in "Cafe Red" so I got on with this before I had finished the earlier trilogy of small paintings loosely themed on American road signs.

I am gradually honing down what I am trying to do with these "Roadside America"/ "The Big Sky" paintings. Each painting has a number of elements that suggest a narrative but in fact I leave that up to the viewer's interpretation as to what is going on. With this one for instance there is a moody sky with the hint of a tornado developing, there is a  deserted street - where is everybody? Are they all avoiding the incoming twister or has something dreadful happened and everybody is dead/gone? Is that bullet holes in the Pawn sign? But the power to the road crossing lights are still on so maybe it's all OK and it's just a quiet moment that has been caught... or has there been some apocalypse and everybody is dead/taken and the power is working on automatic before flickering to a final stop...

Most of my paintings are what I call from the musical term "Jams". What I mean is that they are improvisations on a basic theme - for this one the twister and the wan sunlight in the sky just came out as I painted almost like the painting itself was calling the shots as to what should be happening. Then once they were painted in that dictated the lighting which now had a brighter area at left that reflected the sunlight... all these things were not in my original plan for the painting. I like painting this way, admittedly it leaves more room for things to go wrong but also opens up the possibility of something way more interesting to happen too. I will continue to develop this different way of painting skies with flat colour as the ground instead of a tonal underpainting, this won't work for all skies by any means but it adds more to my repertoire!

Oil on linen 30" x 20".

There is a step-by-step progress through this painting in previous posts on this blog.