Awakening

Update, May 2022: This painting is part of my past series of artwork entitled Cosmic Dance. I’ve created a variety of different artwork over the years, and today I am best-known for my Looking Up series, a collection of large-scale paintings of trees and forests. If you would like a print of a painting that you don’t see available yet in my shop, please contact me. 🙂 -Cedar

Here is “Awakening,” created in 2008.

36 x 42″ Acrylic on Canvas

This is a painting of the first breath of morning–the threshold between today and tomorrow.  I like how the light and darkness are separated–which one is in the foreground?  Is the darkness opening up to reveal a window of sunlight?  Or is the sunlight seeping over the darkness, like a poured liquid?

My goal was to depict the simple happiness of waking up to a new day full of promise.

The light of the not-quite-risen sun stretches its fingers across the sky, in between the delicate swirls of moonlight.

The sun is about to rise behind a young leafy tree, and there is a small flock of birds flying on the horizon.

But the night has not yet released its hold–the sky high above is still full of millions of tiny sparkling stars.

Like all of my recent paintings, this is painted on a gallery-wrapped canvas, meaning the painting continues onto the edges, where the canvas is stretched around the underlying frame, which I built out of wood.  The edges are 1.5″ deep.

What it looks like in a room:

And of course, I made a video for this one.  (I’m on a roll!)