YB Blue..? Be happy!

Blue isn't floating in space anymore; now he's surrounded by a delightful field

His name is actually YB Blue, but everyone just calls him Blue. He’s a Grand Prix-level jumper who floats easily over any obstacle in his path. He seems to be quite contented with his surroundings in this painting.

I “slept” on my dilemma with the background a little too long (at least that’s what I’m claiming as an excuse for the delay in finishing this painting). But once I made up my mind, it took only one morning to complete it. I noticed as I was driving from Michigan to Chicago last Monday that the sky was this most ethereal color of gray/purple/yellow and I knew instantly that this was the sky I wanted for this painting. The field itself was still undecided, but it had to reflect both the sky and the shadow/highlight colors on the horse’s body. The really intriguing thing about the colors in this painting is that they are all leftover paints which I originally mixed for “Castaways”–and the colors in the two paintings don’t seem to have any relationship to one another! When I looked at the leftovers on the palette I just instinctively decided that I liked those colors for this horse, and that was that. This uncertain certainty is another of those mysterious things that makes the act of creating art both an adventure and a reward.