| Toroazul Painting and Fine Arts |
José Grave de Peralta
| The Blue Seawall (El Malecon Azul) oil on canvas 20" x 50" 2015 |
The oil painting of The Blue Seawall ... ...was first developed from this and several other thumbnail sketches in pencil. The small dimensions of the thumbnail field allow me to see the entire span of the composition inside a reduced area---and the informality, "trial" spirit of the thumbnail sketch allow for greater honesty in my drawing hand. |
| The Blue Seawall (El Malecon Azul) ~~~~~PASTEL version on the floor of my studio and the blank canvas with some charcoal markings above it on the wall. |
| The Blue Seawall (El Malecon Azul) Above, several phtotos of the process from DRAWING to Painting |
I decided to create a true-to-size preliminary version of the composition, using soft PASTEL, in order to solve the many problems and issues that any large composition brings with it. Here. I worked on two separate but joined pastel paper sheets (CANSON), colored copper brown. It took me several weeks to complete this pastel version of my work ! |
The subject of this painting was gleaned from a series of family memories in my native island of Cuba in the early 1960s. Recently, one of my nieces asked me to paint for her new home in Boston "something you remember, a trip to the ocean---before you and my Mom left Cuba..." And this is what I created for her, based on what I REMEMBER of the old seawall in Havana, not on photographs---and on the scenario of the family standing along the wall---in more of a symbolic foreshadowing of how we would all soon leave our country, and in the case of my sisters and myself, our childhood. |