Ocean Hill
© 2023
Media: oil on canvas
Location: in a collection
14 x 45 inches
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For those of you with low vision:
This painting shows large porch windows framed in white showing both the landscape reflected behind you, and bits of the rooms inside the windows. At the left side, the window wall ends to reveal the bright salmon-colored pillar of the house (in shade, with a burnt sienna tile floor) that frames the porch roof with a lawn and trees in bright sunlight behind it framing a view of the blue ocean, whose horizon line matches that ocean line reflected in the windows across the rest of the panoramic painting to give a full 360º sensation. Intervening in the prominence of the horizon are the vignettes in the windows: a little girl running away towards a front hall faintly visible in the reflection of dappled leaves and a plant in a pot that could be a chess piece. In the next window are reflected two white Adirondack chairs with two figures sitting in one of them looking away from us, the taller one sitting on the arm rest holding her hand up to keep her big sunhat on. The window to the left shows the peachy reflection of the salmon pillar in bright sunlight dappled with shadows of the leaves which also appear around the shaded pillar and again in several different ways in the reflections and the interior scenes. There’s a few cases where furniture is seen in part, becoming just faint suggestions of forms beneath the reflections of the outside… there’s a Windsor chair on the right and what might be a low table with a blurred object beneath it; there’s a deeply burnt sienna side table seen in the right window playing plinth to the tall rectangle of the bright pillar reflection. Strong lines of the landscapes’ sunlight/shadows mix with the lines of furniture shadows and floor lines to cross diagonally across the lower half of the painting. in deep greens and bright lime yellows, siennas, cobalt grey, and ochres.
It’s a kaleidoscope of images that form a sort of episodic narrative, both actual and purely visual.
