Pastels at Dawn, Old Marsh Road, East Sussex

I can appreciate an overblown histrionic sunrise as much as anyone – the sky ablaze in a suite of scarlets and golds and the newly risen sun’s rays shooting over the landscape, deepening the colours and casting rich shadows – but when it comes down to it my favourite part of the sunrise is the fifteen or twenty minutes leading up to it. My preference is always for soft pastels and muted tomes, and I love the sense of expectancy you feel as you cast your eyes along the eastern horizon and wonder what the forthcoming show is going to be like. This morning’s prelude along the old marsh road had the benefit of a thin ground mist to soften the colours further and create a pleasingly imprecise landscape, like a watercolour, that allowed me to exercise my imagination on it. This was taken about twenty minutes before sunrise on a hill near Norman’s Bay.