5808. Flying...? Poster/Print Poster

Acrylic on raw canvas painting. In the summer of 1989 in the park I used to set up in by the sundial overlooking Great Harbour in Woods Hole, Ma. I took a day off and catching a ride on a friends sailboat over to Martha's Vineyard for the day i rode my bike to the other side of the island to the beach at Katama and as i was walking passed this young brother wearing a grey t -shirt i happened to notice the little silk-screened design on his breast pocket was a black silhouette on a yellow/orange background of someone fishing. Realised what made that design work was the contrast of the yellow/orange and black of the silhouette so i determined to use that same element to express that which i've always been most passionate about.: learning to fly! The next day i painted the first attempt using these elements called "dancin' man?" which was the same design but from the view point of being behind the man on the edge. A few days later i created Learning to Fly, then the Bluedge or nightime version then Daedulus. "Learnin' to fly" became the most popular image i've ever done and it wasn't until 2007 nearly 19 years later when i started to learn how to fly via a computer flight simulator that i realised i should probably do a piece about how important learning to land is to learning to fly. Then one day flying commercially back from Hawaii looking back towards the Sunset i saw this amazing colour gradation from dark ocean to rainbow sky to dark near starry heavens and knew this was something i'd been trying to paint since i first picked up a brush. And it seemed fitting to include in the Learning to Fly series the whole process...