Bar Harbor night...

Elizabeth and I did a drive up to Acadia this fall and I took lots of reference photos. One thing I want to play around with is using daytime photos to paint a moonlit nocturne. This was my first attempt to simplify the color scheme down to night hues, but I think I made it too simple and too much in the blue range, so I have been playing around with a few other attempts before doing a slightly larger version. But even if it may be a bit too monochromatic, I do like the feeling of moonlight on the water, so that is something I can work with.

I am glad to see that cookies with walnuts are winning the vote right now. This poll question has caused some heated debate among my friends. I will probably leave it up until the new year so feel free to encourage your friends to weigh in.

Happy Holidays...

I have not been doing a ton of baby drawings lately, but I thought these pages from my sketchbook were decent, and would make a fun holiday post. She is a very fidgety model and I have to spend a lot of effort trying to keep her entertained with a stuffed animal in one hand as I draw with the other. Tricky business, but it makes for some fun, quick sketches.  Have a great time celebrating your holiday(s) of choice! See you in the new year.

Larger Nocturne...

This is a night painting I just finished in the studio recently. For references I used a photo and a smaller nocturne that was done on site this past spring. It was fun to play around with the different colors of illumination. Night paintings are interesting because so little detail is visible, but the things that can be seen are important to get right.

In other news, I set up a twitter account that I am going to play around with. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it, but if you want to check it out I am @cpageart. As usual I’m a little late to the newest thing, but I want to see what twitter is all about.

Also, check out the new poll question. This is a fun one for the holidays. In the last poll I asked about what type of art books people prefer, catalogs of images or text about art. There were 44 votes. 77% for images and 23% for writings. Both are very important to learning from other artists, and even though I love looking through a catalog of images, I think that recently I have found more help in the writings of artists. I really appreciate your input so thanks for weighing in.

Blue Ocean...

I have been playing around with a few new ideas in the studio, including the challenge of painting water, and how to get the complexity of its colors into a painting. The painting above is a pretty straight forward depiction, but I am trying to get some earth tones into the reflections, and under some of the blues. Deep ocean water like this has a wide variety of influences on its color. There is certainly a lot of sky reflection that comes back as blue, but there are also influences from underneath. There is a cold, dark depth to the water. There is an influence of the colors of the ocean bottom. Underwater plant life can play a role. Rather than just try to copy what I might see in a photo, I want to consider the mystery of the depths of the ocean, and how can I portray the deeper layers of what we see in person,and what we feel when we look into this water. The ocean is both fun and dangerous. I have spent a lot of time in the water and am really comfortable swimming, but there is always a question of what is lurking underneath. And in New England the water is so cold that even in August there is an added danger for swimmers, or anyone who might fall in. All of this is adding to my experience of trying to paint water… trying to translate a deeper experience of the world into pigment on canvas.

The image above is a recent studio painting. About 32″ square. Oil on canvas.

Sorolla in New York...

After visiting the deKooning show I went up to Harlem to see what I thought would be a few Joaquin Sorolla paintings at the Hispanic Society Museum. I strolled around taking my time until I walked into a room that had 14 huge paintings covering the walls in a series that describes the culture of Spain. This commission was painted by Sorolla in 1911. When I walked into this room I was met with this view:

To give an idea of the size of this installation, the panels are 12-14 feet high and total about 227 feet in length. The figures in these paintings are about life size.

I was just blown away by the color and brushwork and structure of the images. I was alone in the museum for a large part of my visit, and it felt like being in a cathedral to celebrate paintings. Museums often make me feel like this, but the surprise of such a massive project made this experience all the more powerful. Here are a few images of some of the panels I found most interesting visually.

The color in this panel was just stunning. There is so much intensity and such extravagant decorations, but Sorolla still kept a wonderful sense of light in the scene. He did amazing things with the subtle color shifts in grey and white areas.

These photos were taken on my phone to give me a reminder of the work, so the images are not great but I have tried to fix them up a bit.

This is another scene that impressed me with the decadence of color that is part of a beautifully structured image. The figures are light and natural in their pose, and there is fine and accurate modeling with the paint, along with a very loose approach to describing some forms.

The image at the top of this post and the ones below are both details of sections that I really like.

I am so impressed by all of the color in the shadows of these grain sacks. They are just full of subtle shifts and also more surprising vibrant passages, that still read like they belong there. There is great care taken with some of the passages, and others are still carefully considered, but much looser.

This is not a great photo, but I wanted to get a shot of some of his luscious paint handling. There is a great simplicity and efficiency in how these shoes are painted, and even though the ground is basically one color, there are small shifts and juicy paint that keep that area interesting. When you look at the small passages of any good painting, you should be able to see a love for painting, for putting pigment down on the canvas. Even though the idea and end result may be different, small passages of Sorolla’s paintings are not really so different than deKooning’s. They are both letting their paint be expressive and loving the act of painting. There are tons of good painters in the world but the very best are always showing us how much they love the process of putting paint down and playing with visual relationships.