A cold night...

After a dinner party not too long ago, my wife and I were driving home and I kept seeing beautiful scenes lit up by moonlight. When we got back to the house I surprised her by putting on more clothes and grabbing the easel to go paint. I only went out in our yard to paint the cast shadows on the snow, but it still felt like an adventure. With the full moon, I actually felt like I could see the colors on my canvas better than usual for a night scene. This is a 10×8″ painting of some birches in my front yard.

Yesterday evening I was doing some studies in the studio and trying some different colors out. I was trying a limited palette of Windsor Blue, Yellow Ochre and Alizarine Red Purple. It’s always frustrating to use such a limited range while I am working, but when I finished up the paintings I was pleased with what I saw. I was trying these colors out for some snow scenes, and I came up with some really luminous light for an overcast snow day. Changing up the palette brings out some great surprises in color schemes.

Also, I forgot to mention that the Ken Kewley article from yesterday’s post was sent to me by another painter, Jason Gunby. I meant to mention him, but forgot to give credit.

No color theory. Only love of color....

I was just reading Ken Kewley on color, and I found some great nuggets. I really like how he talks about making paintings.

“Love colors as writers love words. It is the love that comes through when the mind gets out of the way. Don’t think too much. Trust your instincts.”

“Going towards abstraction does not mean going away from representation. It is more like describing something real by other means than illustration. It is like describing an apple with your hands, forming the shape in the air with your hands, by enclosing an imaginary object with two hands. You do not try to make your hand look like an apple. Paint takes over the role of the hands and does not hide the fact that it is paint. Painting is talking with the hands made permanent.”

Snow cover...

I am really enjoying my time painting snow scenes this winter, and I’m hoping this snow will stick around. I have a few places that I would really like to paint while they are covered in snow, but I can only get a small amount of painting time in before I am freezing. And the last few days the cold temps have just made painting on site out of the question.  A friend told me a great quote she had heard, and that I can only remember the spirit of… that painting snow was not just a question of black and white, but it is all about color.  And it’s true, there is a lot of great color in the snow when you get outside and really look at it.

I also wanted to point out for those who are interested, that there is a subscription bar in the top right corner of every page on this website. If you submit your email address, you will receive notifications of upcoming exhibitions of my work and paintign workshops that I will be teaching. I will send emails out about 4 times a year. I make a point of not flooding people’s inboxes with junk. I really try to limit these emails to the times when I have a few things to announce, and when the announcements are worth the email. Many of you are already on this list, but if you are not subscribing and would like to be kept up to date with what I’m doing, please go ahead and add your name. I am planning an email to go out in the next few weeks with a  few new announcements.

Buried...

We have some very cold weather, but I did manage to get a little painting in yesterday morning.

Below is a quote from Wolf Kahn. I found this on the site, painting perceptions, which is an awesome resource for realist painting. I have been digging deep into this site lately and finding a lot of good stuff.

“Edgar Degas observed, `Painting is easy, till you know how,’ and that’s what I try to get younger artists to accept,” Kahn says. “Sometimes it’s very good to make a bad painting. In fact, sometimes I try to get into some real trouble while painting and look to the work itself to show me a way out. … Painting is a visceral experience, one loaded with subtle information.”

Smearing around pigment...

This painting is an 11×14″ study for a larger piece I am working on in the studio right now. I love seeing this view in the summer when driving home in the late afternoon. It regularly takes my breath away.

I just finished reading a great interview with the painter, Stuart Shils. I first saw his paintings when I was in school in NY. He had a show of paintings of Ireland at the Tibor deNagy Gallery, and it blew me away. In the years since then I have always been happy to stumble onto his work online or in a gallery. Check out his whole interview here.

Below is one part of the interview that I really enjoyed, because it gets to the way I feel sometimes when I am choosing what to paint, and the narrative of the scene is so much less important to me than the story of how I want to portray the image in paint. Not to say that subject matter isn’t important, but so often for me it is almost a means to an end, or as Shils puts it, “an excuse for… the smearing around of pigment.”

“Subject matter, or the “what is it” part of what an image is, on many levels really doesn’t matter, it’s the excuse for something else, the smearing around of pigment. Or let’s say, it’s not the primary motivation. The basements of Italian museums are filled with Flagellations of Christ but why do we pull our hair out with such pleasure in front of ones by Piero and Fra Angelico? Not because of the story, because all those guys are doing the same story; it is because of how they have told the story, in form.  I’ve seen students cry in front of Piero and Giotto, students who have no idea what the “story” is that’s being told. So there must be another story right? And that is the narrative of form, how the picture is built abstractly. Not what is it, but how is it? Where are the lights and where are the darks, what color are they and what shape are they and, what are the edges like? And of course this implies, how do they all fit together, what is the formal unity in which all the parts contribute to? And from all that, emotion, impact and ultimately meaning, all flow.”

The whole interview is fairly long, but I think it is well worth spending some time reading.