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Duxbury Bay Facing North Stage 1

Last week I described a paint-out where I stood at the top of a beach crossover in Duxbury and did a painting facing west toward the Standish Monument, then a painting facing east, the Atlantic Ocean.   This post describes a new painting facing north, not quite from the same spot as the other two paintings, but standing on the northwest end of the parking lot on the bay side looking toward the Duxbury Beach Bathhouse.   

My underpainting was a bit bold, a can of Pastene crushed tomatoes and two vine ripe tomatoes from a still life class a few months ago. The background for this painting was a horrid purple.   This muddy purple actually made a nice underpainting for this mostly cloudy day.



Duxbury Bay Facing North Stage 2

The sky was a beautiful combination of muted lavenders, pinks, blues and whites.   The dune grasses were dried out at this point, a warm naples yellow.   It was low tide so the sand was visible in the distance on bay side shore near the bathhouse.   The two brightest spots in the scene were the second floor windows of the bathhouse and a white house on the edge of the marsh.   They weren't consistently bright, but when the sun periodically peeked through, they stood out the most to me.



A woman who had been observing from her car said she and her husband couldn't imagine what I was painting as they didn't see two "pumpkins" anywhere in the area (she was talking about the tomatoes in my underpainting.   I explained my recycling of the canvas and she noted that one minute the "pumpkins" were there and the next minute they were gone.    That was because I used my big pastry brush to paint the large area of wild dune grasses right toward the end.

Just like with the previous Duxbury Crossover paintings, I am going to add the foreground goldenrod after a few days of drying so that they are bright, clear and uncontaminated by layers of wet paint.