Sunset Under Alabaster Dolls

• Sunset Under Alabaster Dolls
• 48” x 32”, acrylic on wood, 1994

The genesis of this painting came from a sentence Diana Ackerman wrote in her book “A Natural History of the Senses”. She was looking at a sunset out of the picture window in her home overlooking Forest Park, St Louis, Missouri. That sentence still lights me up completely. It reads as follows:

“Each night the sunset surged with purple pampas-grass plumes, and shot fuchsia rockets into the pink sky, then deepened through folded layers of peacock-green to all the blues of India and a black across which clouds sometimes churned like alabaster dolls.” (p225)

I simply painted an interpretation I made up about Diane Ackerman’s sentence.

I also painted it upside down – to let the effects I was creating take care of themselves, rather than attempting to improve the painting incrementally.