Currently On the Easel: Escape from The City

Current state.  The colors are far less blue.  I'm thinking about calling it 

first day of spring.  Lots more detail and definition.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is the current status of the painting under discussion here, after considerable work this week:

A friend of mine said that the orange part looked to him like a wall, not a city.   I do think of it both ways, and I think of a wall as in some ways a symbolic way of representing a city.  Here is another painting I've been working on for some time where the large expanse in the middle is more explicitly a wall, but for me it also symbolizes "city"...

There is a kind of cubist texture to both these wall-city paintings.  In the orange painting that is on the easel right now (well, actually both paintngs are on the easel at the moment) I am working layer by layer, trying to both intensify and deepen the orange color while also develop the cubistic urban texture.

The mountains and sky have a color feel that reminds me a little bit of Rockwell Kent...

Rockwell Kent

The orange 'city' is sort of a cubistic version of the way painters in Italy would depict a city prior to the Renaissance...

... I have a lot of work to do to develop the urban texture.

There is also a Rothko aspect to what I am trying to do with this painting...

Rothko

In a way I am most interested in developing glowing swathes of color.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm far from sure what this painting is about, but it has to have a working title.  The color is more vivid than I am used to working with.  It's perhaps a sort of apocalyptic picnic.  Possibly a better title - apocalyptic picnic.   It's largish - three feet by four feet.  I think it needs more characters in the forefront.