A very big painting with masses of purple, pink and orange
With that huge arc across the middle, enormous colours and a thousand tiny details this painting is going to fill and own any space it’s hung in. Not for the feint-of-heart…
I don’t often get chance to do 300cm wide + paintings but once I had a window to begin this one I couldn’t wait. I’ve had this planned for about six months and it was inspired by an amazing album by Ayreon, a collection of Dutch rock musicians headed up by Arjen Lucassen.
In particular a track of the same name on the CD titled ‘Inside The Electric Castle’; a parody on all those super-groups who used to write songs about mystical places and dragons and stuff.
Anyway, let loose on the fantasy/hero/utopian dream ideas I came up with Across The Rainbow Bridge (and a similar take on the link to the nine realms in the stories of Thor). Central to the core of the painting is the main arc structure or ‘bridge’.
Part of the reason for the impact of the painting is the colour combinations. If I was going to paint something based in fantasy then I needed a range of colours that would convey that emotion too.
What you get when you put all these elements together is a huge and very emotive piece of art. It’s sheer presence is certainly down to the size of it but also in how I have placed the shapes and what I chose to do with them.
I like that the painting feels linked together and, in a similar vein to the legends of Thor, the promotion of us all being joined together is a prevalent one. After all, isn’t the what bridges do? Bring us together? Whether it’s a concrete one or a rainbow one…
