On Golden Sands

About the painting

On Golden Sands is a medium sized lime green and yellow painting created with a series of gentle paint blends and featuring metallic copper, gold and silver. The finish is outstanding and the details are mesmerizing.

The success of this original abstract is primarily the color choices. I have always liked mustard yellow as a color in its own right but even more so when it’s combined with grey. If you add a focus colour into that, like the lime green, you get that bold, vivid element that forms the focal point of the painting.

About the color choices

What’s interesting about the splash of green is that it never detracts from all the other elements around it – in fact it somehow enhances it for me and really allows them all to work together brilliantly. That one single colour feels fresh and uplifting but never dominant or overbearing.

The rest of the colors perform a critical supporting role to the yellow and green. I have woven in a rich, metallic copper into quite a few places and this is an absolute dream of a paint. Its velvety texture makes for some gorgeous effects as you can see in the detailed photos. In places it has tiny droplets, in others it features cells and in just about every other instance it shimmers as light reflects from it. It really is quite wonderful.

Blending and tones

It’s a similar story with the silver and with the small areas of gold. The grey tones bring some gravity to the painting and offer a grounding point on which to dwell. It’s important to have a mixture of light and dark in any painting as it helps your eyes to see both parts if that makes sense. One has to exist with the other.

The rich and diverse colors have been formed into a gentle series of movements with some paint brushes. It’s a simple technique that lets me be very expressive. Moving paint across paint mixes them and that’s how some of these subtle tonal blends are formed. At the end I gave it a little spray of thinners and that was it, job done.

The end result is a clean, fresh abstract that brings light to a space. It has warm, natural tones to help it feel grounded in its environment whilst still being packed full of vitality. Hard to think of a better combination in my opinion.