On this warm October day at the Jersey shore the clouds were moving quickly across the sky — first lots of great potential storm clouds and then followed by little wispy pink clouds. I tried to think about Cezanne's mark-making while painting the little clouds along the horizon.

I had recently seen a large retrospective of Cezanne's landscapes at the National Gallery in DC. I spent much of that show looking at the type of brushmarks Cezanne made. Did he use a lot of little marks, or long strokes? Was he using flat or round brushes? How did he layer colors and strokes over each other? While working on this painting I tried to think about the way Cezanne painted skies. I used small hatch marks with a flat-tipped brush in the clouds. It was such a bright day that the colors were light and shimmery.

This was an exploration in color and value. I mixed only three values each of purple, grey, blue, green, and tan/ocher and used those to build the painting. Because I was not fussing with the color and little gradations the painting only took an hour.