When painting, you sometimes know within the first few strokes that something good is coming. With this painting, though, the process was longer and a bit more complicated. I started the work the previous year, but the subject or the colours just didn’t quite work. Still, there was something in the colours that I liked, so I let the painting “mature” at the summer cottage for about a year.
I had some gold paint and had long been wondering what to use it for. When I took the painting up again, I decided to use gold in this sunset. I applied the paint really thickly so that the golden rays of the sun would show properly. At last the painting found its final form.
From the original version, the sea and a faint pale-red horizon remained visible. The horizon and the sun changed from deep yellow into two different shades of gold, and the gold now almost completely covers the old horizon.
The painting doesn’t do itself justice on a web page, because the gorgeous shimmer of the gold doesn’t show in photos the way it does in real life.