Mourning After Dawn is a mixed media piece that I completed in 2010. My intentions for this piece were unclear at first. It started out as something completely different and went through several changes before becoming what it is now. When I started doing more work with materials to make paintings more three dimensional, the inspiration for Mourning After Dawn came from my 2009 mixed media piece The Other View. I thought I could perhaps make something similar to that piece but much better. The overall theme behind this piece was never 100% clear to me since I often like to make art that allows the viewer to decide what is happening, but the basic theme of mourning the dead was a last minute decision to give the piece some basic theme and to have something going on when looking through the surreal window since Mourning After Dawn has an empty sky when compared to The Other View.

Mourning After Dawn in it's current form started after I gessoed over some work I was dissatisfied with. Since I felt creating texture with gesso looked great for The Eternal Midnight Sonata (a mixed media piece I created in 2009), I decided to do it again for this piece, although I had no idea what kind of content this piece would contain. I had also started working on creating other 3-D textures on the edges in an earlier conception of this piece, but since I was also dissatisfied with that, I covered what I had done by going around the old 3-D work with chicken wire. Around this time, I also wanted to create more work that had more 3-D popping out in the middle of the piece as well as the ends. The chicken wire was wrapped in canvas which further developed the shape of the piece. Molding paste and a great attention of detail while using a palette knife was used to create the thick textures. A combination of glossy spray paint and mars black acrylic paint was used to colorize the frame area. Ceramic stucco with a palette knife was used to create the grass texture. The basic painting was then laid out with the sky being painted with various red and yellow acrylics as well as white and darker colors like violet. The grass area was colored using various shades of yellow, green, blue, violet, and even black. A single color of mars black was used to paint the tombstones. Two different metallic paint colors (gold and copper if I remember correctly) were spread over the window frame area with a palette knife. Polymer gloss was finally used on both the frame and the painting are of the piece. The painting are in particular had polymer gloss that was in place specifically to create transparent texture, in an attempt to create what could look like old glass for the window.

I was always both happy and sad for Mourning After Dawn. I was happy because I thought that after a lot of struggling, the piece overall turned out really well. I was also sad in a way because I now feel that Mourning After Dawn makes The Other View look very dated in comparison. I like the surreal looking window much better than the more basic design I created in The Other View. I also feel the light colors in the background and the dark colors in the foreground help each other. One set of colors helps the other set of colors stand out more. I also feel the metallic paint makes the texture work stand out more as well. If there's one negative thing I can say about this piece, it's that the background is still a little empty even though I tried to substitute it with transparent textures and a thick window frame. Overall though, I'm happy with how this turned out.