It’s a chilly day in the studio – cold enough for the silly hat to make an appearance! But I wanted to share one of my paintings that’s just come back from being framed, and the story behind it.
Inspiration from an Unexpected Source
When Jared Isaacman became one of the first commercial astronauts to perform an EVA (spacewalk), he looked at Earth through his space visor and said simply: “the perfect world.” Those three words stayed with me.
Now, I’ll be honest – I have mixed feelings about billionaires in space. But I am fascinated by space exploration, and more importantly, I believe passionately that we need to look after our planet. Isaacman’s words captured something beautiful about perspective – sometimes we need to step back to see the wonder of what we have.
Capturing Our Perfect World
This watercolour painting isn’t a view from space, though. It’s something much more personal – a sunrise I witnessed on a walk in Halstead, Essex. One of those magical East Anglian mornings where the sky explodes with colour and you can’t help but stop and stare.
Did I take some creative license with the colours? Absolutely. But if you’ve ever watched a sunrise around Suffolk and Essex, you’ll know that some mornings really do give you those lurid purples and yellows, those wonderful, almost unbelievable combinations that make you grateful to be awake at that hour.
The Technique: Working with Indigo
For this piece, I made a conscious choice to use Indigo rather than black for the silhouettes in the foreground. It’s something I try to do on many paintings – using black sparingly, if at all.
There’s something about pure black that can feel too absolute, too final. When something’s in silhouette, especially at sunrise or sunset, you can often see little hints of form, slight variations in tone that suggest depth even in the darkness. Indigo gives me that – it creates the sense of silhouette while maintaining that quality of “you can almost see through it.”
Local Framing, Local Art
I had this piece framed at Sudbury Framing Centre, just around the corner from my studio. They’ve done a lovely job with it – the simple frame lets the painting breathe while giving it that finished, professional presentation.
There’s something satisfying about keeping things local when you can. This painting is about appreciating the beauty in our own corner of the world, so it feels right that it was framed by craftspeople in our community.
The Perfect World
So here it is – “The Perfect World.” Not a view from space, but a reminder that we don’t need to leave Earth to find perfection. Sometimes it’s right here, in a sunrise over an Essex field, in those quiet morning moments when the world seems to pause just for you.
We do need to look after this perfect world of ours. Every spectacular sunrise is a reminder of what we stand to lose if we don’t.
