Sunset One by Melissa Anne Smith

• 15" x 17" approximate framed size
• Oil on hardboard

To come to Northern Michigan in the summer is to watch sunsets. If you miss the sunsets, a piece of the soul of this place has been overlooked. Time slows as the breeze quiets and the water calms. Moment by moment it seems that it couldn’t possibly get better, only to give way to the next minute more beautiful than the last. The fire in the sky bursts and dies away and you are left feeling incredibly awed. My husband laughs as I gasp a thousand times and take 300 hundred pictures but I never feel they tell the story well. So I go to the paint and try to find the color to capture just one of those seconds. It will never contain it all. I push the chroma, it can’t be that, I think to myself. Every color feels too dull, that sky fire too rich, too bright to contain in any medium conceived. I paint it anyway. I must. It burns in my heart.