The Gold in the Water

The sun and its reflection are gold leaf, not paint. That was the experiment. Everything else is flat acrylic laid down in horizontal bands — purple, pink, coral, red, then the dark bank across the bottom — with hard edges between them and no blending. The leaf is the only thing on the canvas with any shine in it, which means the painting does not look the same from two places in a room.

The sun is a clean circle. Its reflection is not, because water does not return anything cleanly. The figure on the bank is small and easy to miss, and it is the only thing here that is not a plant, a band of colour, or the sun.