Pegasus Over Dallas

Stayed in the Hyatt Regency in downtown Dallas for a volleyball tournament and got a chance to take some photos from a high vantage point. Scenes of cities out highly placed windows has become a subset of my work.

I like the opportunity to see a city's old and new buildings from a new perspective. I start with sketches based on a series of photos and work those sketches into a coherent composition that contains the possibility to be expressive.

My first step in applying paint to canvas here was to use a red to outline the various structures. I warp these to imbue the buildings with character. I am obviously not concerned with realism. The next step is to fill in basic color blocks for the buildings. The color of the first building will influence the color of the next building all the way down the line. In this case I started adding detail on the left side of the canvas before I even blocked out colors for the right side.

Some of the color in the painting is true to the color of the photographs. Most of it is not. It's more important to me to convey feelings, to create kind of a tone poem, to make the scene jump out at the viewer. To create a sense of discovery.