Original artwork description:

Most summers I steal things from my local marina. Unusually you don't have to own a floating gin palace or a swanky sloop, or be a member of this marina, near Amsterdam, to be able to wander amongst the boats. There is not much security. If you are careful, therefore, you can take whatever you want. It is perhaps not so well known outside the Netherlands that the Dutch are great yachties. Two out of the 7 teams in the 2017/18 Volvo Ocean race - AkzoNobel and Brunel - are Dutch. The final destination for this race is The Hague. There are hundreds of marinas in the Netherlands - David Attenborough would have a nervous breakdown if he saw the amount of plastic bobbing around in the seas here. So the Dutch know about sailing. It is difficult to sail in a canal, of course, but there are countless lakes, inland seas and coastal waters for people who like going nowhere fast in cold wet conditions at vast expense, to indulge their passion. So I am lucky to have a marina on hand where I can do a bit of creative larceny. I usually go to the marina early in the morning, on a nice summer's day, when there is very little wind and no one is about yet. I wander up and down the jetties, eyeing up the boats, weighing up what is worth taking. It has to be something significant or it is not worth the risk. Like a good diamond it needs color and clarity. The color is especially important because boat manufacturers can be pretty unimaginative when it comes to giving their floating tubs of fibre glass a pleasing complexion. Colorwise if you assemble a gaggle of yachts together you are mostly looking at an insipid chalky smear off blanched off-white. So with this picture I got lucky. I got a deep red hull on the right, the orange buoy on the left, and the blue boat with the creamy ripples in between. It was definitely worth taking. I only had a split second to take it of course. So I took it. Back home, after I had transferred all the shots I had taken that morning on my camera to my computer, I could see that this image was the most valuable haul for that day. All that remained to do was to spend 2-3 weeks painting it, whilst hoping, all the time, that the Reflection Police didn't coming knocking on my door.

Materials used:

Acrylics

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