The Light in the World II

Giclee print on heavy, archival paper. From an original oil on canvas. Paper size has three inch deckled borders on each side. Signed at bottom right and numbered at bottom left. Limited edition of 195 with 15 artist proofs.

The artist recently had the great honor to have recently have toured the Holy Land with a group wonderful people from Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Fortunately, they safely exited the country just before the virus began appearing there. There are so many good memories of the people, places and experiences. Their guides kept them busy every day and although we took a lot of photos, they were mostly of the sights with very few that were the sort of scenes that the artist would be painting from.

An exception to the daily travel photos was an evening in Jordan at a nice hotel on the edge of the Dead Sea. Elliott was sitting alone with this long, unobstructed view across the water to Israel. It was a quiet evening before sunset and he had the long promenade to himself. As the light was changing, he began to shoot the scene. As it turns out, he did the 24 x 24 study on panel and used it for the larger, 4040 oil on canvas.

After his return to the U.S., Elliott kept thinking about that evening and how to create a compelling painting from that idea. Ignoring the main color from the photos, he was struck by the tiny bit of orange-yellow of the sunset in a portion of the photo and decided to create a painting exclusively with those glowing colors. He rejected the sunset portion by using a heavy crop on the photos, just leaving a portion of the long shoreline, sea and sky.

Once the painting began, the land mass became the compositional anchor and the place where the colors started to flow. As the painting progressed, the flow became an important part of the sea and sky as well. The artist didn't catch it at the time, but his insistence on this limited group of colors and movement in every part of the scene is what made it all come together.