Sunrise, Inauguration Day (Preparatory Sketch)

Watercolor pencil and wash on Arches cover, 16 x 20.

Found this, from the period between researching the Lincoln Memorial in early January and actually going to the inauguration – working out how I might handle doing the sunrise on January 20th. This sketch is the opposite perspective from the sunset of January 5th, and is connected to the last two images in the Inauguration Day archive.

This is the point of view I was set on for the inauguration until John Addison Van Doren, my wise and wonderful cousin, suggested the Iwo Jima Memorial and the Lee-Custis Mansion.

The sunrise itself is hypothetical, which reminds me of some sunsets and sunrises given to me by my six-year-old niece, Sydney Sutherland, of Baltimore. (She was five at the time.) As her father, John Sutherland, explained in sending two of the drawings, her sunset was drawn from memory but her sunrise “was drawn completely from premonition.” I love that phrase.

So this is a sunrise from premonition. If, like me, you’re a sunrise painter but not a morning person, those can be very tempting.