Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Storms

I'm still feeling the effects of the recent hurricane that swept up the US east coast. The storm came very close to where I live, and I lost electricity for about a week.

The night before the storm hit, the first bands started passing over us, but there wasn't much in the way of severe weather or rain. There were a lot of interesting things going on in the sky, so I decided to go out and do an oil sketch.


I did this picture very quickly, on some scrap gessoed board. The paint did not adhere well to the raw gesso, but I was able to get something down.

The thing I love about storms are the dramatic clouds. The kind of tropical weather that makes for an interesting sky is not easy to capture, everything moves too quickly. The challenge of this oil sketch, was to compose something in real time, on canvas, that would work.