Medium: Watercolor
Finished size: 12 x 16 inches
Reference: Original photo from my 2023 British Isles trip
This watercolor was painted from one of my own reference photos after a trip to the British Isles in 2023. One of the last places we visited was Stonehenge.
It was cloudy that day, and it rained a little while we were there, which honestly felt appropriate. Stonehenge does not seem like a blazing-blue-sky sort of place. It belongs to damp air, low clouds, grass, and questions.
Before seeing it in person, I had read about the different theories surrounding the stones: that it may have been a burial ground, a place for annual celebrations, a religious site, or something else entirely. But standing there made me understand something in a way reading never had.
This place was big.
Moving those enormous stones from so far away must have taken staggering effort. And that was the question that stayed with me afterward: what would make people do that?
Today, people build monuments, skyscrapers, and massive public works to announce power, wealth, devotion, memory, or importance. But Stonehenge reaches back into a world we can only partly imagine. Someone, or many someones, decided this needed to exist. Enough people believed in it, feared it, wanted it, or served it to move stone across the land and raise it toward the sky.
We’ll never fully know why.
But I had to paint it. I think I wanted to prove, in my own small way, that I had stood there and felt the size of the question.
