watercolor painting by Ray Patrick
A low dark butte under a broken sky, with a pale green flat in front of it and a band of near-black scrub across the foreground.
An extreme horizontal. Four bands — sky, butte, flat, scrub — stacked parallel to the frame with no vertical anywhere and no focal point; the eye travels along the bands rather than into the picture.
Cobalt and steel blue through the sky with cloud in dove and bone. The butte is indigo with one seam of rust along its face; the flat is pale olive and the scrub nearly black.
Transparent washes laid one over another and left to dry at their own edges, so the cloud reads as overlapping flat shapes. The dark foreground is a single loaded pull dragged the full width.
Watercolour on paper. Transparent throughout, with the bare sheet showing round the painted strip.
No signature within the painted area; below the lower left corner, in pencil, the date 022821.