Night Traveller - close window when finished

Night Travller

oil on canvas (2005)
72" x 36"
US$6,000**
Technically speaking, this painting is moving in a new direction (for me) in which colours are fused, edges blurred. For a figurative painter, the handling of boundaries is always problematic.
In this painting I was interested in putting a foreground figure (contrary to the normal rules) right in the centre (as I also did in Give Us This Day) -- and exploring a richness of colour all converging on that centre (as was also the case in "Give Us This Day").
A further point of interest is that in this painting the scene is dominated by the foreground figure (the night traveller) and yet in a sense the foreground figure is absent (her details are not fleshed in) -- so we have the interesting paradox of the painting being dominated by an absence.