Woodtick Under a Glowing Blue Moon — Print & Oil Painting

Two colours, and the picture never asks for a third. A cold saturated blue for everything out of doors, from the sky to the clapboard walls to the sea, and a hot yellow for everything behind a window. Nothing is modelled in between: a shutter is either blue or it is a lit rectangle.

The moon holds the middle. It sits low and enormous over open water, pale green-white, with a broad broken path of light running from it down to a row of pilings in the foreground. A jetty reaches out to the left with a ship moored against it, and a low boardwalk with a fence of stumps crosses the bottom of the frame.

The buildings repay the visit. Clapboard, leaning, patched, raised on stilts above the tideline, with dormers set at angles no builder intended and lean-to roofs added wherever there was room. One wall carries a printed notice pinned to the boards. A great bare tree spreads over the left end of the row like a hand. These are built houses rather than the beached hulls of the companion panorama, which makes this the settled end of the same coast.

One small figure stands on the shore at the far left in a white shirt, fair-headed, no bigger than a fingertip, facing the lit doorways. He is the only person in the whole panorama, and the street has been painted for him to walk into. Part of our Monkey island collection. The companion piece is the village of wrecked hulls, and for a face out of the same nights, the moonlit portrait.