A cold start but wonderful sunrise - oil painting of stream in Northamptonshire

Detail from "Just before sunrise", Northamptonshire.
Oil. Alistair Butt © 2013 - #AB 021361

While on my many trips up and down the country I try and visit locations on route, this was one of those 'small' diversions...

I got to the location well before dawn, what cannot be shown was how cold it was that morning... all the small puddles on the tracks were frozen solid plus there was some frost lying in places. As the sky lightened, one never really knows what each sunrise will bring, but this day the whole sky turned pink and then as time passed towards sunrise, the colours changed with bits of purple, reds, orange, yellows all in wonderful shapes across the sky as each part of cloud caught different light.

It was then selecting one or more locations to gather reference material and this was one of them. The river in the painting is a second channel of the main river, in this case the River Nene, which runs just below the tree line in the far distance from which other material was gathered later.

The whole Nene valley is an interesting mix of river and lakes, lovely countryside and villages but never far away from the big towns like Northampton and Wellingborough.