Treasure Island
© 2023
Media: oil on canvas
Location: in a collection
15 x 40 inches (38 x 102cm)
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For those of you with low vision:
This painting shows a spacious white porch flooded with yellow-amber sunlight cutting shadows that make a pattern interacting with the burnt sienna-colored rectangles of the windows on the back wall and other architectural elements that all add up to something like a Mondrian composition. There are stocky, almost square chairs in the foreground painted a teal blue that, along with the shadows of pale cobalt blue/grey from the railings and posts behind us counterpoints the sunlit yellow-amber, and the windows show the reflected sky in yet another shade of blue. There are counter-high planters and two dome-topped trash cans in the middle ground, all in the same white sunlit yellow-amber and the planters have long looping plants in a touch of green. The line-up of sienna windows is interspersed with bright orange-sienna rectangular cork boards mounted on the wall, syncopated 1:2:1:2, then 3 different windows and a final orange sienna rectangle which is a bar counter. This orange-amber is echoed paley in the wooden floor which ties all these elements together, streaked with long shadows from the setting sun.
Tucked into a shadowed space behind the middle ground posts, planters and trash cans, are a young boy and a young girl in bathing suits who may be playing or not; it’s not clear what’s up. The girl’s head is turning away; her hair is whirling out into the sunlight.
