Lately I’ve found an increasing interest in painting non-existing places. The place in this painting does exist; however, I never visited it at night. As a starting point, I used a smaller study I did earlier this year of trees on a ledge and then tried to imagine the scene on a night with soft, cool moonlight.
I have painted night scenes before, and one of the things I enjoy is to avoid using black and rather recreate deep dark colors with blue, red, and yellow. Black is never the same that way. Then, once the darkness is created, there has to be some light. The contrasts need to be subtle. For the moonlight, I used finely ground oyster shells and mica stones that I brought with me from our visit to Sweden this summer.
