Cetacean Flight Painting

I generally think about any painting I do for a while before starting to work on it, carrying the image I wish to render around in my imagination, and modifying it until I'm satisfied that the vision in my head will produce the effect I intend. Then I figure out the steps required to actually produce the painting. The idea for Cetacean Flight started out as a purely abstract drip painting that was to show silhouettes of two or three porpoises breaching. They were to be rendered in two dimensions with primary colors on a yellow background. As time went on, however I became more and more interested in depicting surrealist scenes with fully developed three-dimensional modeling. By the time I got around to actually painting this image, the porpoises had become abstracted to polywog shapes that showed motion and direction, while simultaneously becoming “realistic” in their depiction. The background changed from an unrealistic yellow to the blue-black of a starless night. The final image shows three moving shapes following each other through a complicated trajectory. The blue figure is rising up in the distance, with its tail tucked to curve its path over and downward. The purple (or is it mauve?) figure is at the top of its path, ready to move downward. The red figure is moving downward and has its tailed flipped upward to turn its motion back toward an upward-moving track.