Painting the Night

I grew up with 26 miles of the wild Pacific Coast as my "long driveway" to civilization. When I painted the following abstract, years after leaving the area, I sat back and laughed at what I'd achieved. Putting the abstract sense aside, this is a pretty accurate description of what it felt like to be an imaginative teenager driving home alone through curvy hills enshrouded in midnight blackness. On the most psychologically brutal nights the blood red headlights in the distance were my only solace that UFOs would not swoop down and whisk me away for evil experimentations. I reasoned that aliens would attack only the complete loners. Of course, this meant I had to try to catch up to cars in the distance ahead....