Advanced Drawing and Painting
"Each of these
luminous and mysterious images of trees against sky, field, and river evoke a
subtle variation of light and atmosphere. The arrangement of the trees -
whether standing in solitude or in pairs or in large groupings seem at once inevitable
and yet surprising, formal yet accidental. All of these paintings are comprised
from memory, imagination and thumbnail sketches from my beautiful basement
studio in my home in Connecticut. I work on wood board, paper and canvas using
several layers of gesso before priming the surface with cadmium red base, a
quick sketch using charcoal is used to lay out the design then the paint is
applied. I work in layers using thinned down oil color, building on these
layers with glazing techniques the colors are adjusted and brought up to
completion before final coats of varnish are applied. Light has come to play an
important part, and when I look back over this body of work, I feel it speaks
about spiritual places, places that contain a quiet inner light, radiating an
ethereal whisper, the places we see every day."
Your next assignment is to create an acrylic
landscape that experiments with the layering of color to create a luminous
atmosphere. William McCarthy and many
artist take photographs and draw thumbnails sketches of landscapes that have an
appealing composition or beautiful lighting.
They then go back to the studio and create a landscape that may or may
not be representational. Some artists
would prefer only to paint outside looking at the natural world and how the sun
affects it, there are many ways to create a landscape or seascape.
For this project focus on:
- ·
Creating a composition that has
atleast 60 percent sky so the horizon line falls below the center of your
piece. This will allow you to focus on creating an interesting sky and you can layer colors in larger areas.
- ·
Choose a color scheme that
includes tints with accents of other more intense colors.
- ·
Search for a landscape or
seascape that inspires you, but that you aren’t “copying”. You can use a photograph you or someone you
know took. You wont be duplicating
them, but observing the colors, shapes, texture of the sky. You can also combine images from a variety of
photographs to create the one you like.
- ·
Abstract if you like. This painting could be a very abstract one
with barely any details if you choose, but you need to have a beginning
reference.
