I've been painting sunsets for a while now. The supersaturated photos of sunsets put forth by Arizona Highways magazine (circa late 1970s) helped motivate my parents to immigrate to Arizona rather than to Australia -- our most promising choices due to the positioning of relatives that got out of then Czechoslovakia before the borders closed. We had to escape. These sunsets represented the utopian American freedom. I'm drawn to this pretense of perfection. I painted a couple of sunsets with color and then started to wonder how they would look if they were black and white. Eventually I removed all the color and am making white sunsets, painting the foreground with interference gold -- my chosen color of goodness in my goodness project.

White Sunset Through a Mesquite and a Quail
2010
gesso and acrylic on canvas
60.75" x 60.5"