Description
A heavy, dark leaved tree fills most of the right side of the canvas, its trunk and low hanging branches framing the view like a window onto the water beyond. Underneath it, two dark, rounded shapes, haystacks or piled nets, sit at the water’s edge, and past them the bay opens out in streaks of blue and violet carrying two small white sailboats, their sails catching what little wind there is.
The far shore is painted as a low band of warm orange and tan hills under a soft, pink-tinged grey sky, the kind of hazy, overcast light that flattens colour into broad, simple bands rather than sharp detail. A scatter of tiny, barely-there figures on the beach at the lower left, a few dabs of pink and dark paint, gives a sense of scale without asking for any real attention.
In the foreground, the grass is worked in loose strokes of pink, green, and violet rather than plain green, a cool, shadowed colour that sits in contrast to the warm far shore and makes the whole space feel deep, the tree close and dark, the water and hills receding into soft haze. Coastal views built around boats and water are a smaller, secondary strand next to the figure paintings that dominate his output, though he returned to them steadily whenever he found himself near the sea.
It is a landscape built on that contrast between the solid, shadowed foreground and the pale, open water beyond it, the two small sails the only bright, hard-edged shapes in an otherwise soft, atmospheric picture, the kind of view that would suit a wall needing a quiet note of blue and green.
