Improvisation

This past weekend, my friend Jan Kilburn held an event called Artists on the Lawn.  First, working from a sketch, I did a painting of a couple of boats in the moonlight.  Then I painted some flowers in Jan's garden.  But finally, I decided to improvise one of my dock scenes.  I painted the underpainting first, and then proceeded to invent elements of a typical working dock.  The only object that wasn't a normal part of the waterfront was a bell that accidentally developed during the underpainting.  I attributed that to whimsy. 

This painting became a statement about color more than subject matter.  Mingling colors on a saturated sheet of paper is a fun, inventive way to paint and is the equivalent  of musical improvisation, a jazzy, playful event.