This 30″ x 30″ arylic painting, “Sunburst,” is a new iteration of the sunburst in the center of my previous panorama-format painting, “Prismatic Canopy.”
I’ve been painting my Looking Up Collection, paintings of trees, since 2005. It’s the longest-running body of work I have created, and I’m still adding to it!
The consistent theme throughout this body of work is the trees. But in the past couple years, I’ve added a new component: The sun.
I’ve not only been adding the sun into most of my paintings, but also incorporating effects into some of my recent work that are only seen in photographs, like halos and lens flares.
This artwork is about prisms and rainbows, the scattering of light as it separates into all the different colors, and the blinding radiance of pure white light when it hits our eyes.
Some of these paintings thus have become more about playing with light than they are about the subject matter of the trees.
There is potential in painting light in this way for endless artistic experiments with color!
Yet, the trees are still there. The backdrop is always a beautiful forest. The theme of this painting is the full spectrum of visible light, against the backdrop of a Pacific Northwest forest.