Here is “Dawn Unfolding,” painted in 2005. This painting is one of the ones that sold from my very first gallery show in 2006.
While I was working on forest paintings that were to be the jumping-off point of my “Looking Up” series, you could say that this painting was a jumping-off point for what would become my “Cosmic Dance” series.
Dawn Unfolding. 40″ x 42″, Acrylic on Canvas, © 2005 Cedar Lee
At this point in my exploration of these themes, I was focused mostly on light-vs.-darkness in my work. The light of the sun is reaching out like fingers, pushing the darkness back. The darkness is heavy, stubborn, pushing back, but eventually making its reluctant retreat.
The landscape is dotted with bits of glowing gold light. This glow faintly outlines the trees in the foreground, which are lined up like an audience witnessing the drama in the sky behind the smooth rolling mountains.
The colors are rich, unexpected–in the darkness you see purple and rust. In the light you see pastel pink, lemon yellow, and silver-blue.
As I was to paint this theme of the sun spreading its light out into a dark sky over the coming years, in later paintings I incorporated the moon too. After that, I went into outer space, creating many images of fantasy nebulae before moving on to the theme of the solar eclipse–a theme which I’ve painted again 13 times in the past year!
