It’s Canada Day long weekend. We’re at the Pender Islands Beaumont Marine Park, camping
with friends and their families for the long weekend. This is Blythe, a favourite subject of mine.
She’s the youngest daughter of Sean and Patty from Vancouver. Here, she is four years old.
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I enjoy painting Blythe partly because of her demeanour – perpetual innocence and curiosity.
And for her almost-white blonde hair, which shines in the sun and creates terrific contrast.
This painting, however, is a reversal. It’s the end of a long day of play in the water and on the
sand. The shadows of the tall trees that ring the campground are lengthening over Blythe and
the beach. The water, dappled with the reflection of the trees on the far shore, is still bathed
in sunlight and fairly vivid in colour.
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I was drawn to this image by the stillness of her pose. It’s also a reversal of typical painting
guidelines … painting the background in high contrast pulls it forward. I’ve countered that by
using warm colours in Blythe’s figure and cooling the colours of the water. It was a technique
my father employed on a regular basis, and it takes the painting out of the norm, stretching
pure reality. For me, it’s that slightly stretched reality that makes the painting interesting.
Viewers can generally sense that something is a little different, but don’t usually stop to
analyze what it is.
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The composition also breaks some other guidelines, as the figure and focus are fairly central,
which is generally frowned on. But I liked the balance of weight, with Blythe’s figure taking
slightly more than half the canvas, and the water area slightly larger on the side she’s facing.
The composition also creates two interesting negative triangular shapes on either side of her.
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This painting is a study for a larger work I hope to get to some day. “Blythey,” as her dad calls
her, is a joy to paint.
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Mark Heine