Two weeks ago I shared the finished painting — The Beauty Of The Settting Sun, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches — and explained that it came from a composite of observed sunsets and photographs accumulated across years rather than a single reference.

Last week I showed you the underpainting — the value structure in raw umber and Payne's gray that everything else builds on.

This week I want to show you the moment the painting finds its voice.

Here the warm colors arrived — first the initial application of cadmium yellow and cadmium orange into the cloud mass, then the more developed stage where those warm tones have been extended, refined, and pushed into relationship with the surrounding dark storm clouds.

Look at the difference between these two photographs and the underpainting from last week.

The cloud mass in the upper left has received its initial layer of warm color — cadmium yellow deep at the brightest center of the illuminated cloud billows, cadmium orange pushing outward toward the edges, raw umber kept visible in the darkest recesses of the cloud where the sunlight does not reach. The dark storm clouds around it have been deepened with Payne's gray and burnt umber — because as the warm center gets brighter, the surrounding dark must get darker to maintain the value relationship established in the underpainting.

This is the principle I teach consistently: luminosity is always relative. The cloud glows not because it has been painted brighter but because the darkness around it has been made darker. The eye reads the relationship, not the absolute value.

Then warm color has been extended downward — the horizon line now catching warm light where the sunset illuminates the top of the island or headland form in the middle distance. This was a specific decision: the headland form in the underpainting was a flat dark silhouette. Allowing warm sunset light to catch its upper edge immediately integrates it into the sky's light source and gives the composition a coherence it lacked when the headland was simply dark.

The water surface has also received its first treatment of reflected light — the specific green-gold of sunset reflected across a dark choppy surface. I will describe that decision in more detail next week when I bring the complete sequential series to a close.

What you are watching across these sequential photographs is not technique. It is decision-making. Every mark is the answer to a question — what does this painting need right now, and what will it need next? The years of watching sunsets that informed the original composition are the same years that inform every answer to that question.

— Gorden McMurry, The Painting Physician
gordensoilpainting.com