Working Towards a Crescendo...

"The last thing you paint is 

the first thing people

will notice."

                    Andy Braitman   

I'm certain I have quoted Andy before; I never get tired of his nuggets of wisdom.  And once again my mind is reeling, full of Andy-isms and new ideas and just-realized a-ha moments when things start (only start) to click into place.  It takes a while to recover from a Braitman workshop, he is an energetic painter and an enthusiastic teacher.  He leaves us all gasping for air and begging for more!

This past week was my annual dose of Andy, his July workshop at Carlton Gallery here in the High Country.  I'll let the process of one of my experiments speak for itself.  Our theme this year was "prismatic progression."  And it will take a while for me to fully digest it and be able to actually show you what it is.  Meanwhile....

I start with a very small value study - a lot will change between here and finished but it helps to have a roadmap starting out.  When complete, the painting may only have a vague similarity to my inspiration photo.  

This is 24 x 20 and the point of this first pass was to put down the values, contours and leave plenty of texture to work against later on.  Andy uses a lot of mixed medium at this stage so the large flat bristle brushes can smoosh out a rough surface.  Now, I will confess that I got my wrist slapped (gently) for the magenta trees in the middle ground.  NOT because they are magenta but because they are almost identical blobs of same size shapes dancing across the break.  Fixable I was assured.

With the first day's work dry I could move in to add more color keeping in mind that the value study is a guide to tone.  This photo was made outside so the colors were captured beautifully.  Notice that i have moved the horizon line in from where the not an sketch had it.

My apologies for the poor photo above, with little light on it the colors feel washed out.  But that is always a good check (a black and white photo) to see if the darks are still holding their own and if transitions in value are believable.  I often sit and eat my lunch staring at the piece in this stage.  The final applications of paint are much more calculated now and slowly applied.

Calling it finished.  I'm certain you feel better with the magenta somewhat submerged...but it is still evident in places and I think it ties the composition up rather neatly.  Exhausting.  Too much thinking.

Practice will make it come much more intuitively.  

It's going to need a name....something better than "River of Angst."

Magentfully yours,

Cindy

Limited Palate Painting

While color intrigues me, I am learning that

unless you have control of the color it can

totally overwhelm a painting.  I have been trying

 to learn how to limit my palate and become intimately

familiar with how color mixes.

For this limited palate experiment I selected 3 analogous colors (next to each other on the color wheel) and the complimentary color to the center one (in this case, the purple).  Add to this the ingredients for mixing black (burnt siena and french ultramarine) and a white, and I have all of the tubes I would use for the entire painting.  No, this was not my comfort-zone palate.  Game on.

I laid out the colors and began to imagine what I could mix up from different quantities of each.  Once a lovely color is found you can lighten it and get several tones from it.  This part is really fun.
The hard part is reproducing in a large amount something that suddenly works in a small bit.

My subject, the entrance view to the Santa Elena Canyon, was already laid out on my 24" x 24" canvas in the three tones of black and white.

done with a black charcoal, medium and white oil

Now I went in with large swatches of color mixed from the limited palate and staying carefully within the tones I had established with the charcoal and white above.

you might be able to see some texture I laid down in this first pass:

I used a roller, made scribbles with a rubber tip and drew lines with my palate knife

I kept mixing and began to add some dimension to the grassy bank, put a little more interest 

in the front bank and tried to get a handle on how the rocks would jut in and out.

I like working on dry layers (this helps preserve the texture which will eventually show up better) so by necessity I worked slowly and methodically.  I would eat my lunch talking to the piece trying to determine what would be tweaked on the next round, the next day. Again, I had to use only the few tubes of paint I had laid out.

Here's the final...maybe.

24" x 24" oil

Santa Elena, incomplete

I'm not so pleased with the mound of the upper left rock....which was going to be my focal point.  I need to redefine it in some way that is believable (the top edge really softens near the sky) but still remains an eye grab (lightest light next to the darkest dark).  But otherwise I think the piece hangs together nicely.  Perhaps some of that lighter gold up there will help?  See?  The problem solving is actually fun when you have limited tools at your disposal.  

Right now I have a totally different piece underway with the exact same palate.  Stay tuned to see how different it is in coloration.  

LIMITING COLORS...for now,

Cindy

Back to Basics & Beyond

Why is it that no matter what we do (tennis, paint, draw, pottery)

it takes a professional to remind us that

when we get stuck, the best course of action is to

return to the basics, those key pillars we

learned waaaaay back when we were

just beginning?

I had one of those "I've heard this before" moments when I spent 3 days in an Andy Braitman workshop this past month.  I love his work, his teaching style and what he is able to coax out of my

"stuck" brain.  And while we had been told to come prepared to paint clouds, in true Andy-fashion he changed up the entire syllabus (as such) while driving in.

Where did we start?  With tonal paintings, like notans in a sketch book only larger.  We spent a great deal of time discussing eye moment, the golden mean and all the old standbys but Andy added his special elements including a spiral inward, a progressing formation of rectangles proportionate to each other....and so much more.  But when paint came to the canvas we started with a basic 3 tone underpainting full of movement and texture.  The thickness and texture is hard to see in this photo, I was clearly too enthralled to remember to document my progress (heck, I can't even decipher some of the notes I took, I was so filled with info and excitement.)

But here are 3 beginnings, three values each.  The two pieces on the left and middle both started from the same photograph I had taken in for reference.  See how they change depending on the preceding discussion.  Note the shoreline on the right.  Thats the one I will show finished (or almost) below.

White, mixed black and mixed grey.  An underpainting which will serve as a roadmap for the next stages as well as a base of some texture which we pushed with rubber nibs, brushes, rollers....whatever floated our boat.

Then we chose 3 analogous colors (beside each other on the color wheel) and the complement to the middle color.  I had a deep purple, a deep blue and a pthalo blue with a yellowy orange.  We could also use a mixed black and a white.  Then we got to mixing color....that part was incredibly fun.  How many different colors could you get with your combo and how could you get at least three values of those colors.  For the first time in a long time I really enjoyed playing with the mixing...I am pretty sure it was because being forced to limit the palate at the start reins in the overwhelming feel of it being too much to deal with.

Here's my finished marsh piece.  Or at least finished while I decide what else it might need.  Andy kept emphasizing that we needed to spend twice as much time looking and mixing more as applying paint.  Thats an excellent rule of thumb for someone like me who tends to go just over the edge....ruining a painting quickly by acting in haste.  

So the Back to Basics was a very sound lesson....and leave it to Andy to push us Beyond.  I am having a great time working on my other starts.  I can't wait to share them.

BASICALLY YOURS,
Cindy