jenifer lake
'aurora borealis' watercolor moon 2-D artwork
These watercolor moons are my go to when I want to zone out a little bit... or practice meditation through art. I've watercolored these for a few years now & I always come back to them as a settling in practice. I call them "aurora borealis" because they seem like color explosions on a hypothetical moon. I hope you'll enjoy them too.
These are on 6x6 custom embossed circle watercolor paper. I've used a mix of watercolors but also with some special metallic watercolors so they each have some lovely shimmer to them too. These are in my studio & ready to ship. Each one is signed & dated.
Inspirational moon quote that envelopes all the color excitement i think about with these pieces:
“The dimness of those dropping constellations was not all the fault of the vapours that haunt horizons. A rival pallor was spreading at the other end of the sky, and very fast. Behind a flutter of hills a rim of blood-red lunar segment was rising. It expanded to its full diameter and then dwindled; and when the circumference was complete a tremendous crimson moon was casting loose. It changed to orange and then to yellow as it climbed and diminished until all the colour had ebbed away and left it to soar with the aloof and airy effulgence of silver. During the last hour’s walking, twilight and darkness had masked the behaviour of the hills. Now the moon revealed that they had receded once more and left the Danube free to break loose. It was a week after the spring equinox and only a few hours short of the full moon, and as this is one of the few reaches where the river flows due east, the line of the moon’s reflection lay amidstream where the current runs fastest and shivered and flashed there like quicksilver. The reefs and shoals and islands and the unravelling loops of water which had lain hidden till now were all laid bare. Wastes of fen spread from either shore and when the surfaces were broken by undergrowth or sedge or trees, they gleamed like fragments of flawed looking-glass. All was changed. The thin-shadowed light cast a spell of mineral illusion. The rushes and the flags were turned into thin metal; the poplar leaves became a kind of weightless coinage; the lightness of foil had infected the woods. This frosty radiance played tricks with levels and distances until I was surrounded by a dimensionless and inconcrete fiction which was growing paler every second. While the light was seeking out more and more liquid surfaces for reflection, the sky, where the moon was now sailing towards its zenith, seemed to have become an expanse of silvery powder too fine for the grain to be descried.” -Patrick Leigh Fermor