Visitors

Hot on the heels of "Hub Prime" comes another S/F painting, "Visitors". It's actually an adaption of one of my early ideas for the IX Commission which I didn't use, originally it was a figure high up on a tree on a mountainside looking towards the rising sun with this big sky seen between two layers of cloud. I still fancied painting the skyscape and realised that I could have an alien spacecraft bursting out of a cloud, I painted it looking quite menacing so we're not sure if they mean good or ill!
I wanted to get across the idea of a beautiful unsuspecting earth suddenly being visited by an alien race and decided to put a coastline town below with the unsuspecting inhabitants about to get a shock, nasty or otherwise. I wanted the juxtaposition of a beautiful Earth as we see it every day suddenly having to confront the reality of dealing with an alien race which surely one day we will have to as it is crazy to believe that we are the only sentient beings in the Universe.
I based the picture on a yellow/violet complementary axis introducing the nearby colours of violet/blue and a subdued green to give more of a variety of colour. I used mixes of Ultramarine Blue, Ultramarine Violet, Kings Blue Light, Pale Violet, Winsor Violet, Permanent Orange, Burnt Sienna, Naples Yellow, Cadmium Yellow Light, Lead Tin Yellow Lemon, Permanent Sap Green, Zinc White and Warm White - mostly Michael Harding paints.
Oil on linen 30" x 20".
There is a step-by-step progress through this painting in previous posts on this blog.