When the subject is color

The subject of a composition can be anything, created with the artist’s use of drawing, light, and color. Often, for me, color is as much the starting point as the scene itself. In this quick pastel sketch, I chose the intense yellowish-orange light of morning, surrounded by varying shades of lavendar, rose, and violet.

The scene, of a local farm not far from my house, is cluttered with stuff–trees, equipment, trucks–and it’s a very dark red structure. It faces north, and I pass it nearly every day, early in the morning, and it’s the morning sunlight coming over the east hills that warrants being captured.