The shadow of the trees lengthen and pool together, a rising tide of dark, a lifting veil of blue and violet night. Across the western sky a streak of cloud hangs, its shadow charcoal, its face luminous blood and flame. Palm trees march toward it in a weaving row, their round shock of fronds burning in the last light of the day.

The horizon lifts. The sun drops behind the endless curve. The color fades from the cloud and falls back to blend with the sullen sky. On the ground, night arrives as a lake of violet dark, transforming the narrow street into a dark expanse of open field, the marching rows of houses to squared blocks of standing stone, the trees against the darkening sky to a limitless parkland of silhouette.

I see this and turn to paint, to attempt to capture even a hint of the glow of this fading light, a taste of the encroaching dark, to capture the sense, the feeling of being immersed right here, right now...

I battle with the image, wrestle with the color, outside myself for the long moment that stretches into hours—each daub of paint a piece of the puzzle, each painting a house of cards. I know, but try not to know that every mark of the brush may be the last, may be that one stroke too many—too dark, too light, too dull—that final, murderous stroke that drops me out of the illusion and into the paint; that makes me lift a wad of cloth, wipe the color from the panel, sigh, and begin again.​

CB MacNeil


Bio
MASTER OF FINE ARTS DEGREE, CRAFTS; 

California State University Long Beach
BACHELOR OF ARTS DEGREE, GENERAL ART;

California State University Long Beach
ASSOCIATE OF ARTS DEGREE, LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES;

Palomar College