Sky around the corner

One early evening I was on a train going home. The sun has just set behind unbelievably beautiful, fluffy summer clouds. I was mesmerized by the pink shades and the sense of the calm coming from them but it wasn’t until good several months later that I felt the urge to paint what I saw. The composition of a photograph I took back then seemed too simplistic by the standard composition rules. I cropped the image and thought about the the dynamics and movements in it. Once I started painting, the colors and shapes came through so smoothly it felt like a song. Or like a summer evening breeze. When it was almost ready, I showed the painting to a dear friend of mine. He asked, ‘Aren’t you going to add a flock of birds or something?’ I understood where that question came from and thought about it. This would normally be the ‘right’ approach to break the huge monolithic mass of empty skies, but something inside me rebelled this idea. The emptiness of the skies was precisely what I liked about this scenery in the first place. The spaciousness and almost nothingness. It gave me the feeling of getting bored on a hot and humid Sunday evening. So I let this pink sky take the space and play the first fiddle. I hope that when you look at it you will also feel that it is OK to just to be.