Somewhere along the shores of The Black Sea stands the famous shrine of a Sufi saint called Abu Moussa. He lived as a hermit on the rock promontory overlooking the sea for many years and although he lived a life of solitude and contemplation he was visited by many devotees seeking enlightenment which he always claimed he could never give them but they came anyway. On his death some devotees built a small shrine on the promontory that over the years was enlarged and added to until it appears as you see it today and continues to be a place of pilgrimage for those that make the arduous journey to find it. Some people never find it as it is rumoured to move at night so that only true pilgrims may find it whereas tourists all search in vain.
Well maybe.
This is the daytime version of a previous painting "The Domes of Jebel Moussa" which can be seen below. I liked the setting and composition of this picture and thought that it would be interesting to see it in daylight. Although a complete fantasy I wanted it to look as though it was a real place (hence the back story to add a supposed authenticity) so I decided to try and give it the feel of a crisp, bright morning with the tide low so that I could use the complementary of blue/orange to advantage. Setting it in daylight however brought with it certain problems. In the night time version little detail is needed to delineate the architecture and rock shapes but in the light of day everything has to look right. This was fine for the rocks but when it came to the buildings I had to redesign them a bit to look possible and real. To emphasise that this is a fantasy I have deliberately combined and invented different elements of Islamic architecture so that like all my Orientalist paintings they are much more in The Arabian Nights tradition than anywhere real or historical. So in that way continuing the genre of Orientalist paintings by Westerners in late 1800s and early 1900s some whom had never actually been there and were the constructs of their fevered imagination of concubines and harems etc.
To try and keep the colours in the sky clean and bright I decided to do the tonal underpainting in two colours this time; I painted the landscape in my usual Burnt Sienna/Winsor Violet mix but did the sky in washes of blue.
Oil on linen 20" x 16".
There is a short step-by-step progress through this painting including the colours I used in previous posts on this blog.
The Domes of Jebel Moussa
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