Welcome! I am a landscape painter, living in the beautiful western US. My husband & I spend all the time we can in the back country, hiking, driving, exploring, whatever. We never tire of it.
In this blog I am posting the things I talk about with my painting students, trying to distill many complex ideas into small, useful nuggets that I often pull up to help me work through a painting. I put my URL in my profile.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Think in terms of negative space.
The shapes or intervals around your subject matter are one of your most expressive tools.
Vary the intervals
If some of the shapes in your painting look awkward or boring, they may be too close in size. Think about making one shape larger than the other. This is so simple, but thinking about it at the right time is about the handiest trick to have up your sleeve that I know.
Painting is all about being aware on many different levels: color, composition, light, paint-on-a-surface, and of course the mysterious essence that we all are after. It all comes with practice.
As Wylene aptly put it, "Let your brain take over." Every artist in the world knows exactly what she means!
Painting is all about being aware on many different levels: color, composition, light, paint-on-a-surface, and of course the mysterious essence that we all are after. It all comes with practice.
As Wylene aptly put it, "Let your brain take over." Every artist in the world knows exactly what she means!
"Those diagonals are a steel trap." --Neil Welliver
Beware of awkward stops in a painting. Make your shapes and intervals dance with the edges, the center lines, and the diagonals.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
The Interaction of Color
“In visual perception, a color is almost never seen as it really is-- as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.”
• Due to physical processes in our retinas, our eyes quickly acclimate to whatever color we are looking at. We can observe this process in afterimages: when we stare at a colored shape and then at a blank field we see an image of that shape in its complementary color.
• Josef Albers, a student of Hans Hoffman, wrote a very influential book called The Interaction of Color, which shows studies of many color phenomena based on this physiological process. Simultaneous contrast is his term for the tendency of a color to appear different from an adjacent color and to make colors that are not adjacent to the color appear more similar to it. (Think about how when hazel-eyed Anna wears a green shirt her eyes look green.)
• ‘Local color’ is the named color of a thing, i.e. whether it is red or blue. Color in painting, however, is about local color and more, a whole universe of more. Color can seem to dissolve into pure light; it is all about the relationship of the colors.
-- Josef Albers
• Due to physical processes in our retinas, our eyes quickly acclimate to whatever color we are looking at. We can observe this process in afterimages: when we stare at a colored shape and then at a blank field we see an image of that shape in its complementary color.
• Josef Albers, a student of Hans Hoffman, wrote a very influential book called The Interaction of Color, which shows studies of many color phenomena based on this physiological process. Simultaneous contrast is his term for the tendency of a color to appear different from an adjacent color and to make colors that are not adjacent to the color appear more similar to it. (Think about how when hazel-eyed Anna wears a green shirt her eyes look green.)
• ‘Local color’ is the named color of a thing, i.e. whether it is red or blue. Color in painting, however, is about local color and more, a whole universe of more. Color can seem to dissolve into pure light; it is all about the relationship of the colors.
Artists we have looked at
Adele Alsop (contemporary)
Duane Keiser (contemporary, 'Painting a Day' movement)
Willem Kalf (Dutch, 1619 - 1693)
Duane Keiser (contemporary, 'Painting a Day' movement)
Willem Kalf (Dutch, 1619 - 1693)
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