Middle Way

-
In Buddhism, the Middle Way is the path that avoids two extremes. Not denial, nor indulgence.
In watercolor, I have to find the right point, the perfect balance, between all the possible edges. Not too many hard, not too many soft, some lost, some found - the middle way.
Edges are another whole topic in watercolor. To me, it is so exciting to discover a facet of this medium, and how deep it goes, how much information there is about it: composition, edges, color, how the eye moves, hierarchy of shapes. I am slowly getting an art education as I spend time exploring watercolor. And I feel I have the rest of my life to slowly learn it, slowly get better at it.

This was done en plein air in our front yard this morning over my second cup of ginger-mint tea. It takes a lot of patience to work in layers - the basic overall shape first, then the carving out of darker blades and lighter blades of leaves, some in front, some behind, creating depth on the 2D sheet, a fair bit of negative painting, and then the final darks - the deep crevices in the plant where the light cannot reach, that gives the plant its 3D form. The key is to hit the ends of the value range - lightest light, and darkest dark both.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Connected shadows

-
Image
I have often passed by the Campbell Community Center/Heritage Theater and been struck by the beautiful Spanish Colonial Revival architecture with intricate ornamentation. Finally, I had the opportunity to paint it today with the SCVWS Thursday plein air group. I think I should have used a ruler for this as some of my verticals aren't parallel to the edge of the paper! I do like the purple/blue shadows and how the colored shadows blend into one another around all the bright white areas. As always, for me, greens are troublesome - they often look overworked in my paintings. But, I am pleased with this overall.                       “One Ticket, Please”
Read more

Faith vs. belief, and inspiration

-
Image
In yesterday's Gita session, we discussed the difference between belief and faith. I found myself saying that a belief was hard-edged and inflexible, and faith all-encompassing and flexible and always positive - akin to having a big-picture trust in the cosmos. When I heard myself say "hard-edged," it made me realize how many terms and ideas are so interchangeable between the world of watercolor (art) and spirituality (life). When edges are hard, the eye stops at each edge before it goes to the next "item." It's like stop-and-go traffic. You are making progress but it is not smooth, not a flow. When edges are soft, your eyes travel easily, from one object to the next because the divisions between the objects are blurred, and the values do the talking. It is like life, like consciousness. We are all one - not so hard-edged and separate - yet we don't know it, and bump up against one another because of our hard edges, fixed ideas and notions, prejudices an...
Read more

Design- vs. content-driven

-
Image
I've found that strong design-driven art is more attractive to me than content-driven paintings. Of course, the content or subject is there (unless it is truly non-representational work), but it is realized and recognized a split second after one has responded to the design. For this reason, subjects that lend themselves to being more easily abstracted - interiors, close-ups of anything, still life cropped just so - are more appealing than standard impressionistic distant landscapes where the shapes themselves tell you sky-earth-mountains-lake. A landscape can also be abstracted but I feel there is more effort in hiding or veiling landscape features for the slow reveal to happen. I've been working on this still life, and just starting with a notan helped me understand and crop shapes right away. Pushing some of the lighter shapes to the white of the paper helps with abstraction. Like a chess board where each shape is bordered by a contrasting value shape, or the way we typicall...
Read more