When painting this bright and bold seashell watercolor I again had the intense and rich orange and purple color combination in mind. What I really wanted to show, though, was a warmer way of life than the northern Cape Cod climate when painting this in summertime, warmer Washinton, DC. Make no mistake Cape Cod is definitely a cool place to paint for an artist but I wanted to imagine that the artist in me and the eyesight of the viewer was on a desert island, a tropical paradise like Gauguin in Tahiti or Van Gogh in the sunny South of France. By painting the deep purple clam shell solidly in serious linear and blocked-in shadows I show satisfyingly its weight in the world of seashells surrounded soothingly by a glowingly optimistic "ocean of orange." I wanted the viewer to experience a painted clam shell like one I never painted before, a once-in-a-lifetime cool Cloud-9 created clamshell!