Today’s watercolor experiment:

The idea I had in mind when I started today’s composition was a science fictiony scene with two blazing suns at the horizon, each in the midst of a solar eclipse, a phenomenally rare occurrence on my made-up planet.

I drew the horizon about 1/3 of the way from the top of the paper, which was positioned in landscape format. Then I wet two semi-circular spots above the line and applied my cadmium red in the middle and lemon yellow at the periphery. I did not get the blazing corona that would befit any self-respecting eclipse, so I changed my plan.

I wet areas underneath each of my suns, except for a crescent shape in the middle of each. These would be my moons. It would be as if each sun saw the moon as its own reflection. I toyed with the thought of making the area below the horizon as wavy as a body of water, but I do not have the technical chops to tackle that at the moment, especially with two moons in negative space embedded therein. Instead I used the cadmium red and lemon yellow combination around the edges of the darkness surrounding the moons combined with phthalo blue around the red/yellow mixture. For the final flourish, I added a midnight blue (indanthrone) between the two suns, above the horizon.

I like the color combinations very much. It would have been much more elegant if I were successful in executing my dual solar eclipse idea. Then I could have tried my hand with interacting reflections below the horizon.

As it is, the objects as suns and moons don’t make sense. The moons are made up of black empty space with white intended as the solid shape. This is not consistent with the shapes above the horizon, which are intended to represent the masses of suns.

Self inconsistency is allowed in art. I merely have to invoke my artistic license and call it abstract expressionism.

Inconsistency is a double-edged sword. The viewer can interpret the interaction of shapes however they wish. For example, a viewer may choose to anthropomorphize and see my study as an abstract variant of “Kilroy was Here“, graffiti that was seen around Europe during World War II.

In truth, this study falls short of elegance. In fact, to see the image as a pair of eyes is probably an automatic response.  Perhaps this happens through an organizing property of the brain, which is always looking out for faces, friendly or not, with which to contend.