Painting less

-
Shirley Trevena says that mindset is a big thing before painting. And she says that planning is important before painting as well. She does color studies, sketches, shape arrangements, and during painting, will pause and do cut-outs of colored paper to hold against her partially-completed painting to see how a particular green might go with what's already on the paper.
I am intrigued by that.
Also, I was startled to come across this fact in various places over the course of a week - that some artists will start two versions of the same painting based on the same initial sketch. While one dries, they will work on the other one - try something different. I don't think it's like reading two books at the same time (which is what occurred to me when I read that).
The third thing that intrigues me right now is coming across (again) Jeanne Dobie's interview in which she says she set herself a challenge to paint only half the paper, and to use the unpainted parts as part of the composition - not to simply leave it incomplete looking.
I think my best paintings are those that have a lot of white in them - and if they aid the composition, all the better.
With that in mind, I took this photo I had taken in Kyoto a year ago, and tried to paint less, rather than more. The notan I thought was very successful and true to the "painting less on the paper" (not painting less in life!). While meditating today, the colors came to me - a sunset orange sky bleeding into the orange details of the temples, and cool neutrals (blue+orange) where needed, and overall a complementary scheme (blue+orange, maybe split complementary with a blue-green in places).






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