More of England

After I quit painting my wild and crazy version of Cambridge, I decided to go wild with brushwork but stay truer to color with a painting of Windsor Castle. The goal was to show a soft view of the castle but not too fairy-tale. It is 8x12, and I ran out of time in class, so this is what one hour produced:

I under painted each block of color in its complementary color. So the castle was a yellow, the front tree was purple, and the green tree was red. My overall color scheme would be considered purple/yellow although it almost goes purple, green, orange.

In a Fog...Painting & Results

I recently posted about some of my successes. Now, I'm going to post about a less successful painting...

I love bright, bold colors. Dramatic contrasts. Paintings like my ballerinas exemplify that. However, I know that to evolve, I need to learn softness and subtle changes. After visiting the Houston's Monet & the Seine exhibit, I decided it was time to give it a chance. Monet painted a lot of soft winter scenes, where the main color is white.

Every color is softened with white.

I decided to practice using a photograph I took on a trip to Carmel. It was a cold day, and there was a mist in the air. The water appeared more gray than blue. But what I loved about that day is how the yellow flowers in the field glowed through the otherwise grim day.

The first issue I had was the color scheme.

This photograph didn't naturally lend itself to one of the color schemes. My teacher suggested yellow and purple. I understood her reasoning. The yellow would contrast and glow, and purple for mountains and mist is pretty common. However, I just couldn't see it and feel it. Thus, I did a couple of studies.

One is in purple and yellow. The other red, blue, yellow. The red, blue, yellow spoke to me. (I may still go back one day and try with softer purples, but we'll see.)

The next issue I had was making that soft, misty feeling of the fog. I needed to keep my colors muted with lots of white, the greens muted with blue, and keep all the edges soft. One of the main problems I keep having is mixing subtle changes in color, whether it is for these soft edges or for skin color. In that way, I was a little more successful with this painting.

I achieved softness, but I lost a little depth. I had trouble defining the foreground without losing the softness. Also, I think the yellow competes for attention with the red roofs. If my goal hadn't been to make those flowers glow, I think the painting would have been more cohesive.

Anyway, another thing I learned from the Monet exhibit was that even he felt the need to keep painting the same scene again and again. He painted studies and pieces of things before he got it the way he wanted. And he often just painted the same thing in different ways and with slightly different colors schemes. One sign at the exhibit said that Monet went out one day to a bend in the river with something like 10 canvas. He painted the same scene from the first scintilla of daylight until the final shadow of the evening fell. 

I guess if I make this painting 10 times, it will improve...

Coloring Winter

I think I should be deemed a colorist, someone who wants to change and increase the colors of reality. That has been my mission during this holiday season--to experiment with color schemes. One interesting color scheme is the tertiary color scheme. The most standard of these is red, blue, yellow.

Let's consider this picture.

Now this one could go a couple of ways. It could be a analogous complimentary color scheme of red/orange/yellow and bluish-green. Or you could make it tertiary of red, yellow, blue with the street being bluish and the green being more bluish.

Winter scenes are common with the other tertiary color scheme: orange, purple, green. That is what I decided to try. I had noticed this triad in this Monet painting in St. Louis.

First, I started with the instructions for a painting from a book, with a similar color scheme.

Then, I chose a photo from my trip to Colorado, similar to this one.

The Aspens were bright yellow. The mountains were brown/gray with snow on top. But to make my color scheme work, the mountains became purple and the Aspens went slightly more orange. Now, yellow and purple could have worked as a color scheme too, but something else would have needed to happen with the green.

Seeing the Museum Differently

I took a week off from my class and my own painting to do some traveling. During my travel, I stopped off at St. Louis's Art Museum. (Best part--It's free!)

The art museum is more haphazardly laid out than any other I remember--although it might just be that I didn't understand the logic of it. In one room is impressionist, the neighboring one might have modern works, and the third will have art pieces of the Native Americans or artifacts of the Inca.

I whizzed by most of the modern art. Sorry! But I like abstract realism- is that the word? Where a real place or object is abstracted in form or color but you can tell what it is meant to be. Large pieces of artwork painting solid black or with lines just don't do it for me. I also flew through a special exhibit on Polynesia. It was pretty good because it had the meanings of the objects explained, but since I have never been and don't plan on going to Polynesia, I breezed by it. I wanted to see paintings!

When I saw this Monet painting, I suddenly understood the triadic color scheme of purple, green, orange. I had trouble understanding how to apply it before. Now, I would love to paint some other bridge with this lovely scheme.

I think the bright colors, especially blues and greens attracted me to this painting, but what made me stop and look at it for a while was the brushwork. I liked to see how all the different brushwork came together, the thing I struggle the most with now.

Take a look at the brushwork up close!
Also, it reminds us how realism and perfection don't always go hand-in-hand with good painting. Sometimes you just have to step away from the painting! (So often I hear us in class telling someone to stop, it looks great when the painter wants to keep going with it.)

This painting caught my eye for nothing technical but for subject. I have seen dark paintings of factories expressing the gloom, the depression. Instead, here the painting is pretty. It looks happy (probably more like an advertisement would want us to believe). Could it really have looked so idyllic? Or does it just show the painter's belief in industrialization?