Golden Horizon is a textured abstract cityscape oil painting, and the honest read is that the city is the smaller half of the canvas. The sky takes up the top two-thirds in thick palette-knife gold and pink, and the buildings are a thin band of soft purples and greys at the bottom. The piece is an abstract first, a cityscape second. That ordering is on purpose.
The studio worked the sky wet-on-wet, which is why the colors blend into each other rather than sitting in hard lines. The buildings are painted last, on a drier surface, so the silhouettes stay simple. There is no specific city in mind. The painting is a feeling of a horizon at dusk, not a postcard of anywhere. The impasto is heaviest where the gold catches the most light, which is the upper left corner.
A wide horizontal cityscape wants a wide horizontal wall. Above a sofa, behind a bed, or on a long hallway are all reasonable homes. The gold warmth means the painting does well in a room with cooler lighting. If your lamps run very warm, the gold will read even warmer than it does here. The piece also works in a dining room, where the warm sky can take the edge off a colder light fixture.
The studio also wants to note that the painting is not trying to be a photograph. The buildings are not based on a real skyline, the studio did not work from a reference photo, and the city is a shape rather than a place. If you want a cityscape that is recognizably New York, or Paris, or Tokyo, this is the wrong painting. If you want a cityscape that is recognizably an idea of a city at dusk, this is the right one.
One practical note. The painting is wider than the photo might suggest. It is one of the wider pieces in the studio right now, and the wall you hang it on should be at least as wide as the canvas itself. A wall that is narrower than the painting will make the work look crowded, and the work needs air on either side to land properly.
