A few weeks ago I participated in a silent auction fund raiser. I donated some paintings and ended up buying one. In addition there was a rather hideous (really it was) painting in a big carved frame. It was 30x40 and really heavy duty. I got it for $32 with my eye on the frame and not the painting. Because the frame was off white I had to find a subject that would work so I started going through my photos. I ended up picking one of cliffs going down to the Salt River. The shoreline has white rocks and boulders so it was perfect. I used acrylics and spent a lot of time building up thin layers of texture for the cliffs. I went back and defined them with more opaque paint. I had a lot of shadowed areas that were contrasted by the areas hit by the sun. It was really a fun painting to do where everything when pretty well. Usually you pick a frame for the painting, but this time I did a painting for a frame! I think it goes perfectly with this fancy frame.
We had a cool stormy Monday last week. The clouds kept coming up and down on to the mountains. The colors were cool and interesting. Here is my paint set up on the trail.
Alan and I saw an idea sort of like this at a local fair and zoomed down to the scrap yard. We got all the stuff we needed down there and made this to hang on the patio. It is all natural metal except for washers that I spray painted blue, purple, red-orange and black. It was a fun project.
A couple of weeks ago I attended a really fun workshop led by Stan Kurth called Painting Without Fear. It was really a fun day. Stan had worked for years doing tight graphic design work that was driving him crazy. He finally broke free to do his own art and it is loose and fun. He showed us lots of examples of his work and explained the process of building up texture, layering color, taking away color, layering more...He then begins to look for suggestions of imagery that he can define more with added details and often opaque paint around the negative spaces. This really wasn't new, who hasn't imagined images that accidentally occur? But what was new was the timing of the joy of playing with your images like you used to! Most of the participants are competent artists who are serious in their work. We all had fun and did indeed feel like we were enjoying painting without fear. Lessons for me included being way more patient building up layers of texture. It is worth the time to layer and consider those additions and subtractions. I was working on thick nice watercolor paper instead of canvas. There was something yummy about that paper. I also learned that you can scrub off acrylic with alcohol. That was news to me and a great new tool! I already use gesso when working with acrylics, but that is part of the opaque layers. Stan mentioned contrast of opaque and transparent and I sometimes forget to let that contrast be one of my tools. Here are my results for the day with Stan as well as some additional images, including some working from the model.
