Artwork Description
I can imagine Claudia noticing this view while travelling through the countryside. Not necessarily somewhere remarkable, or even somewhere she intended to stop. Just a stretch of farmland where the morning sun has caught the fields, turning them a wonderful golden yellow against the darker hills beyond.
What interests me about "Morning Has Broken" is the amount of space Claudia has given to the sky. It occupies almost three-quarters of the painting, and yet there's very little happening in it. The pale blue has been worked over with broad, barely visible marks, and the colour changes so gradually that you almost don't notice. It's quite a brave decision to leave so much of a canvas seemingly empty. Then there's that narrow strip of yellow near the bottom. Without it, I think this would be a very different painting. It draws your eye down from the enormous sky and gives you a sense of the sun moving across the land.
Claudia has spoken about this collection being concerned with the act of looking rather than the destination. I find that particularly relevant here. We tend to remember the spectacular views from our travels, but it's often these ordinary stretches of countryside that I find myself thinking about afterwards. And perhaps that's what I enjoy most about this painting. Claudia hasn't tried to make the landscape more interesting than it is. She's simply noticed something worth painting.
