Rainy Day Painting

Rainy Douglas SOLD

There is something positively plaintive about a rainy day. This stretch of shops with its lone car really pulls at my nostalgia thread. The most difficult part is not the wet street; it is the compression of values to be seen in the windows at the left with the warm tones fading into vague structure. Rather than try to exactly represent these, it is best to leave much of that to the imagination. Every person has their very own prop department in their brain. When I say, "fireplace," you conjure up that prop from your back rooms. If I suggest it is large, you fill in the details and make it large. When you have a passage in a painting that is vague, your brain will feel a sense of mystery, a curiosity, and it will figure out what it thinks best represents reality. Almost every passage in a painting that is in shadow or very dim light, needs only the vaguest suggestions to render an image (think of any Rembrandt painting). Remember, at night, our eyes use only the "rod" cells in our eyes which are sensitive to only the fact of light, not the color. Thus, at night, color is washed out or subdued. Detail is also lost. In shadows, we can adjust our eyes to the darkness, but it becomes a case of isolation and is not true to the overall scene. Leave shadows vague.

This painting is not yet finished because I am wrestling with a dilemma. A couple of doors and windows have lettering, some of it large, which I've yet to include. My gut feeling is that to add these will cause a distraction--we do love to read. I don't want the viewer to be pulled to a specific plane in the painting. I want them to move from shallow foreground, the street, to deep background, the interior of the shops, freely. I am currently leaning towards leaving off the lettering, or dulling the letters down in value so much that they are inconsequential. Of course, I will probably put in the letters and make a decision. Should they be wrong for the painting, it is dead easy to overpaint and recover the original.