New project: Alley Painting

This is the first stage of a scene I've been wanting to paint for a while.  I like the idea of ordinary, even mundane scenes achieving some kind of majesty when you focus on them.  Here, I think the complex network of pipes, poles and wires in Galveston's downtown alleys has an almost Gothic elegance.  Along the same lines, I recently completed a watercolor of a view through the columns supporting Murdoch's, an establishment on a pier in the Gulf.  I don't have a good picture of the result, but here's one that has some reflections from the glass it's under:

What I like about this scene is that it is just a bunch of posts in water (along with decayed old posts), but the repetition of the vertical columns combined with the play of light on the water makes it beautiful.  I think the scene has a cathedral-like quality.  I'm hoping to capture something similar with the alley painting, though it won't have this kind of intensity of light and color.  I'm aiming for a more muted effect, with a lot of pastels.  There isn't a lot of color in the alley, after all.