The best painting I ever did will be the next one I do.

That afternoon I noticed the cloud formations were ideal for a fireworks sunset. I put my gear in the truck and grabbed two large panels. I already knew which one I would use. The place I had in mind would be about a one hour drive. I pulled up on top of the hill and wasted no time in setting up. I tied the easel to the truck so if there was wind my panel wouldn’t become a kite. I began mixing large piles of warm and cool oil on my glass palette because I knew when the time came I would have to apply lots of paint fast. I finished and figured I had about an hour before the real light show would begin. I started building my composition of foreground and middle ground shapes using a large flat brush and quickly punched in the impressions of the landscape as it lay out before me. I knew I needed to keep my values dark because I wanted to capture the light as it would play after the sun went down. But the sky would be my main focus for this painting. As soon as the sun dropped over that ridge I would only have minutes to capture those colors. When the sun started dropping over those worn down mountains I put down the brush and picked up a large palette knife and began mixing and applying lots of paint and the sky began moving across my panel. I brought some of those amazing sky colors down as highlights on to those beautiful ridges and plains below.

I step back a lot to look at the over all painting as it is unfolding and try to pick an area to either leave as it is or add to it. These actions are made consciously it would seem at the time but afterword looking at what minutes before was a blank panel it feels as though something beyond the self is at work. At that moment you become immersed in the present, combined with all you see and so very humbled by creation and your attempt to imply with pigment what Light has already stated before you even had a thought about how you might copy it.

I drove away that evening thinking I had come as close to capturing the essences of a sunset as I ever had. Then I remembered what a friend painter once said.

“The best painting I ever did will be the next one I do”.

Oil on panel plein air 24 x 48 (sold into a private collection 2004) artist: Len Sodenkamp