Colors of the Sea is one of those paintings I’ve been thinking about for a few years. I’ve had the image sitting in my files and every once in a while I would pass through it while looking for something else. I had just finished the Graffiti Train Car Series and the opportunity jumped in my face. There is so much detail in painting a ship like this that I didn’t have the attention span to recreate the photo-realistic version after painting the train cars. What this was all about was the color of the containers anyway. I tried not to get too busy with the details and just concentrate on the shapes and what colors went with what. I like the idea that the first thing you notice about this painting is not necessarily the ship but the colors. The shapes of the background and the houses are very abstract and the sky is as loosely painted as I could make them and still be representational. The direction here is almost like one of the Bright Series paintings and seems to loosely follow that direction.