Sunset On The Street oil painting

A painting of a sunset lit street with the light and shadows passing over it.

SUNSET ON THE STREET, Canvas Size: 24″ X 36″

This cityscape shows a road that descends a small hill and then passes into the horizon as the sun sets. The horizon is a distant line of trees and a number of suburban water towers. Cars drive to and fro upon the road that is split by a number of boulevards. Upon the boulevards are a number of bushes and tall trees, most of them closely cropped and tall as they spread out like umbrellas over the road. Closer to the view, everything becomes shrouded in shade cast by the trees on the far right. The road is now speckled and streaked with the light and shade of the setting sun.

The view down this road has always caught my eye. As the road reaches its peak before descending down the hill that you see, there is a view that is quite far. From a car, one of the more noticeable items on the horizon is the collection of water towers that stand out against the sky. I had wanted to paint this view for some time but I didn’t get around to it for a long time. When I did, I found that what I really wanted (the view of the water towers) was restricted by the places I could paint. Many of the views that we usually see are actually from the vantage point of a car in one of the lanes of traffic we are riding in. Short of closing the road just for the sake of a plein air landscape, most artists have to paint to the side and I found that what I wanted was not exactly what I could see from the curb. In particular, the perspective changed. From where I could paint, it was the trees and the shadows became more visually important than the distant water towers. In fact, once you stood still, the water towers were barely noticeable. This is the effect caused by viewing scenery at 40 miles an hour. In a car, everything close to you whirs by in a blurr and all you really focus on are the more distant objects. Once you get out of a car and walk. It is everything that is close to you that you notice.

With that change, I raised the horizon to incorporate the interplay of light and shadow on the street and the way the trees towered over the road. I had seen little of this before.

My style had developed it’s own technique. I painted the horizon first and painted that little box of intersection that lies below it in the painting. I relentlessly marched forward: tall trees, buildings, bushes, until a band of detail was finished across the middle of the painting. The vast amount of foreground took longer as I planned out tall stands of shrubbery and the lengthy cast of shadows they created.

In the end, it is the tall trees that I like the most. I like the way the light dapples upon them and the outlines they create against the sky. I also like the light of this painting. It was the best time of day to paint this view and it has a luminescence that I enjoy.

Other works of Fine Art you may enjoy:

The Connections Of Mary Cassatt

Bend In the River, an oil painting

Silence In the City, a cityscape painting