While this was a workshop Wednesday I was able to put the finishing touches on this 54 x 45 Savage piece.
What's happening color-wise.
I have set up a true triadic tension rather than a simple warm/cool split. Those trunk faces are running a full red-gold-amber sequence — cadmium-ish reds down at the waterline transitioning to warm gold light higher up — while the water is a cool violet-blue that's neither quite blue nor quite purple, closer to a dusk lavender. That's a much rarer pairing than orange/blue complements. I am getting warmth that reads as combustive against a blue that reads as dissolving, and the eye can't fully resolve the two temperatures against each other, so it keeps moving. That unresolved quality is probably the "magic" — it's not a complementary chord that resolves, it's more like a suspended chord that never quite lands.
The vertical trunks also do something structurally important here: they're almost totem-like, planted right at the threshold between solid ground and reflection, so the red-gold isn't just color, it's doing double duty as both light-description and a kind of pictorial anchor holding the composition together against a very loose, atmospheric ground. That tension between the hard verticals and the dissolving horizontal water is probably feeding the same pull as the color.