About Town: Sleepy Hollow Autumn Sunset with Bridge, Part Three

This is the kind of sunset that makes me feel small, and my efforts and those of all the other small people in the world seem minor.  The action in the sky is on such a grand scale that the buildings and the people below seem like toys.

This is not a bad feeling.  It's awe.  It means we're part of something tremendous. 

Action is written in the sky by the clouds.  Wind patterns and moisture are behind it, I know, but when I'm out there under the shifting and fleeting glow, it seems to me that it must be the work of a Great Scenic Designer in The Sky.  It's great theater to shift from daytime's white clouds against a darker blue sky to twilight's dark purple clouds against a lighter, multicolored sky.  Add to that the reflected light of the sun, coming from below the horizon, making the bottoms of some of the clouds glow red or yellow, and you've got something truly spectacular.  In this stage I've used liberal amounts of French Ultramarine and Alizarin Crimson to make the dark areas of the clouds, and I've resisted the impulse to add more white than I should.  You can't have a luminous sky unless you have deep darks to make the lights glow.

People in a painting often carry much more psychological weight than their relative size in the composition, as I said regarding my previous painting, but already we have an exception.  The two people represented here haven't got a chance to take over this one.  The lighting is part of it, and if I wanted them to be more important I would put a street light on the left and let them be walking into its glow.  But these are not specific people and I'm not doing the painting for them.  I'm happy to let them be noticed after the scene behind them.  They add something important but they aren't the stars. They look very comfortable with each other, walking close together with shoulders possibly touching.  I've made them youthful and casual, perhaps part of the buildings in the distance, perhaps people who've gone to enjoy some time at the river and are on their way back to town.  I hope they have enough presence to make the viewer wonder. 

Next time I'm going to add some details, especially in the bridge, but I think it's important to keep some of the architecture quickly indicated in an Impressionist way.  If it's too precise it will become an illustration and lose some of the breathless, emotional quality I see in it now.  I love this painting, and I think it's different from any that I've done before.  I hope to follow in Renoir's footsteps, in that he was talking excitedly on the day he died at the age of almost seventy-nine about what he had learned about art that day.  Now that's the way to live.