First Brush of Spring

During this past week and weekend the First Brush of Spring happened in New Harmony Indiana. It was my first time at the event and I really enjoyed it. Artist were allowed to enter work that was done from Thursday morning up to Saturday morning into a contest Saturday afternoon. The winner of the show was an oil painting by Jeanne McLeish http://www.home.earthlink.net/~burkettmcleish/. The composition was killer and the color was amazing. I don't have a picture of it but hopefully she will have it up on her website soon. 

The whole experience was memorable. I had the chance to stay and paint with Larry Rudolech http://www.rudolech.com/ and also paint with Wyatt LeGrand http://www.legrandartstudio.com/.  I got meet two artist from arkansas, Jason Sacran http://jasonsacran.com/, and John Lasater http://home.centurytel.net/Lasater/home.html that I'd never seen before. They had some awesome work that I really enjoyed looking at. Those are just a few of the amazing artist there. Check out Indiana plein air painters website http://www.inpainters.org/ for some of the other artist there and perhaps photos from the show soon.

Anyway the painting above was done from the Indiana shore looking across to Illinois. The sun was going down and the scene had to be painted. The composition and color were something I couldn't have thought up better myself with all the time in the world. I had this piece and a few others stamped for next years field to finish. This will most likely be the entry for that show.

Practice on the little stuff

Even with the good weather I've still been working a lot on still life. Part of the reason is to build up enough work to show together, and the other is working from life on this scale is good practice for me to do large outdoor work. The little geisha doll painting above was done back in February. It has been sitting in the room that we did still life in at the pump house for as long as I can remember. It always caught my eye but seemed too complex and small for me to tackle. After looking at it so many times I finally decided to paint it by breaking it down into small shapes. Once this painting was done I started challenging myself to paint more complex items. So far it seems to be helping with my plein air work. It is getting easier for me to see the abstract shapes instead of the preconceived idea of an object. A problem I have outdoors is bringing form to objects as they recede. The more I'm thinking about it, color and temperature change seem to be what is stopping the objects from being modeled in my outdoor landscapes. Now I continue to practice on still life and apply it to my other work.

The more I have worked in oils, the thicker and more varied my paint application has become. The painting above is a simple design of a single pomegranate on its side. This is an extremely simple composition and it let me play with my brush work. It may be hard to tell but the paint is thicker than previous paintings (this was done back in December). At the time I was in such a rush to find a style that I wasn't experimenting as much as I should have been and this little painting helped me see that developing a style takes a lot of time. Up until this painting I was content on my application of paint and was more focused on developing my compositional sense.

Recently I picked back up my palette knife after setting it down to work exclusively with the brush. For me I need more time to experiment with as many tools as possible. The thing that was stopping me (I was stopping myself but this is my way of blaming others) was being surrounded by so many good artist here in the region that paint in a specific manner. Whether it be exclusively brushes, knifes or a mix of both, these artist have put in the time and realized what is needed to convey what they want to show people. Patience is a virtue and its something that I'm doing my best to build up. With more time and practice my technique will improve so I can get down to showing what I see.  One day perhaps I will find that elusive style that flows from me. Until then I will search under all the rocks around not knowing what it looks like, but will just enjoy flipping over rocks.

All about Still Life

My last post was about getting back outside to paint, but I would like to make a few post about still life while it is fresh in my head. The painting above was done in the middle of what I would call my still life season. From the end of  November until the beginning of March I spent most of my painting time working in still life.

Perhaps it was the desire to work from life that got me on such a kick to paint still life or maybe too few field sketches and reference photos. Regardless, still life was the focus of the past few months and now my appreciation for artist that do good work in still life is great. I regularly follow quite a few artist that work in the subject to see what they have to say. A thing of interest for me is to see how an artist works out composition with their still life. I've seen artist that use one angle and concept to do all their work, while others will use a different angle and experiment with new (to them) concepts all the time. Here are a few of the artist that I am watching. http://www.qiang-huang.blogspot.com/, http://carolmarine.blogspot.com/, http://lisadaria.blogspot.com/. These are all artist on DailyPainters. If you follows blogs and daily painters, chances are you know who carol marine and qiang-huang are.  Lisa Daria is some one that I just noticed a couple months ago, but she has been painting much longer than that. I'm a huge fan of their still life paintings and every time they post something it is worth checking out just to do some analyzing and see what they are thinking about.

The painting above was done back in January. At the time I was looking at distorting edges. The knife in the painting has a lot of hard and crisp edges while the apple is softer and almost ethereal in appearance as it recedes into the background.

Today's exercise

These value scale under paintings are all 5"x7" and took about 5 minutes each to finish. I started by drawing quick thumbnails of all the photos in my current potential paintings folder. After 15 minutes and 30 drawings later I chose these 4 (because I only have 4 pieces of paper left) to paint. I circled my favorite four and then transfered them with slight adjustments to sanded paper. I then got a dark purple hard pastel and filled in the dark and mid values and used paint thinner to push around the pigment for a painterly effect. Im getting to the point where drawing these thumbnails is almost art in itself and it doesn't seem like work. It is easy to see now how some painters of old became so immersed in their art that it consumed them completely.