The Old Hay Harbor Bathhouse
© 1991
Media: oil & mastic on panel
Location: in a collection
4 x 20 inches
*** For those of you with low vision:
This is a very wide panoramic painting, showing an open-air bathhouse that stands by a stretch of water in a bright morning seascape. The extreme stretch of the painting’s format is echoed in the stretch of the bathhouse building, with four aisles of grey-green roofs on top of white walls, and again in the stretch of the bay of water behind it, then by a finger of land extending out from the left, and then the wide stretch of ocean beyond it. In the foreground, the bathhouse is on the left at the water’s edge, in shadow with the dawn sunlight raking across its top. To its side, an umber and grey dirt road fills up the center of the foreground, and on the right a grass-green lawn fringed with shrubs in deeper greens and siennas slopes gently down in a tight triangle that points to the center where there’s the dark sienna railing of a walkway. The water is a light cyan and cobalt blue with pinks of the sky reflected in it. The finger of land running across from the left has the greens and siennas of the foreground with sandy shores colored amber by the dawn. Where it slips away underwater, it pops up again on the right as a wide pile of rocks that are a nearly-white amber-grey, fringed with dark sienna seaweed. The cloudless sky above is pale cobalt blue that shifts to pink towards the horizon haze. Near the horizon there’s the white hull of the ferry crossing to the left where the sea turns a pale turquoise.
