Archive for January, 2010
Adding Life to the Living Room
A living room is the first room your visitors will see upon entering your home. This is where you most often entertain guests and visiting family and friends. Hence, it is important to keep this room attractive and inviting. Redecorating your living room doesn’t have to be burdensome.
You do not need to overhaul the whole room by painting the walls a different color or replacing all the furniture. The secret is to start with the small details. You can add decorative throw pillows to make the couch more appealing or perhaps change a vase or two and the room will look new already. Make a room look more contemporary with some abstract expressionism paintings. It’s all a matter of finding the right new pieces to blend with the old.
Gauguin: Life is Color
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) lived in Peru as a child and spent 6 years before the mast as a young man. He became a prosperous Parisian stockbroker with 5 children for a period of 10 years before he took up Sunday painting in 1873.
By 1883 he ditched his family for his new love - art. He headed for Brittany, a backward province of France, where he hoped to find the “savage instinct.” He proceeded “to restore painting to its sources,” meaning primal emotion and imagination. And when Brittany was not primitive enough, he moved to Tahiti.
He refused to reproduce surface appearances, instead transforming colors and distorting shapes to convey his emotional response to a scene. “Life is color,” Gauguin said. “A painter can do what he likes as long as it is not stupid.” He freed us from the restraints which the idea of copying nature placed on us. He flattened forms, used color arbitrarily for emotional impact, and - above all - presented his subjective response to reality. “I wanted the right to dare everything,” he said and he dared to portray an internal reality. It is no wonder he is among the founders of modern art.
Toulouse-Lautrec: Posters of Paris
Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) was born into France’s most blue-blood family, but was a self imposed exile from high society due to a childhood accident in which he broke both legs that didn’t heal properly. The result was a man of powerful torso, but with very stunted legs.
His most original contribution to art was not in landscape paintings, but in the graphic arts, where he made the new form of lithography and the poster respectable media for major art. He was a master at delineating character in nightlife scenes: cabarets, circuses, bars, and brothels. But instead of looking like a caricature drawn by an artist, the people in the paintings make caricatures of themselves.
First you notice the flaming red lipstick and pasty faces. Then you notice the top hatted men and an orange haired prostitute. Even the background figures are more than local color. He often included himself in the painting. He’s the little guy in the bowler hat standing beside the tallest man in the bar.
Seurat: Pointillism
The loose approach of the Impressionists freed the next generation of artists to be even more experimental. They extended Impressionism in new directions.
Georges-Pierre Seurat (1859-91) wanted to scientifically explore the nature of light and color and use that knowledge in his art. He found that colors, when adjacent to each other, affect the other. For example, a blue lamp on a yellow stand casts some of its blueness on the stand and the stand casts some of its yellowness on the lamp.
He also found that each color gives off its complement, from the other side of the color wheel, in its shadow. So the blue lamp has in its shadow, not only blue but also orange. The yellow stand throws off hints of purple, so the blue lamp shows splashes of yellow and purple. Seurat applied his dots to emphasize these effects and make the colors seem more vibrant in the viewers’ eyes. His most celebrated landscape painting is ”A Sunday on La Grande Jatte”.
Time Out
Every once in a while I have to take time to get myself organized. I have to photograph paintings and put the photos on the web site. That happened last week when I added eleven new photos to my site.
Tomorrow is another such day. I must finish the landscape paintings I started last week at the Preserves so they can dry and be included the next time I put photos on my site.
The Caloosahatchee Creeks Preserve
Today my friend and I headed out Route 78 to the Caloosahatchee Creeks Preserve to do some plein air painting. This is also known by the locals as the Pop Ash Preserve because the Pop Ash Creek runs through it.
Several parking spaces were available and a boardwalk ran along the road. Also, there was a hiking trail with boardwalk and handrails as far as I could see.
We set up our easels on the boardwalk along the road and tried to capture the native grasses, palm trees, and creek with its many reflections. It is always a challenge to me to try to express on canvas the feeling of an area containing such abundance of wild growth.
The Flatwoods Preserve
Today was another good day for plein air painting, so my friend and I set off again for Pine Island. We stopped at the Flatwoods Preserve near the southern end of the island.
Flatwoods Preserve has a hiking trail just over a mile long and several hikers passed by and said “Hello.” There is not much else there except slash pine trees, dead trees, local grasses and palmettos.
The birds soared overhead, the planes left vapor trails and the clouds moved slowly across the sky. Whether or not my picture turns out well, I still had a great day!
What is Plein Air Painting?
While it may seem like there is a typo in the title to this blog post, the expression “en plein air” is actually French. As you can probably imagine, the phrase translates simply as “in the open air” and is used to describe painting outdoors. For hundreds of years artists have been taking their easels outside to find inspiration, but plein air painting was particularly in vogue among the Impressionists of the mid-19th century.
Many artists claim that the main advantage of painting outdoors is the lighting. The light outside is referred to as diffuse light and creates a “large white umbrella.” Not only does the lighting behoove the painter, but it is also obviously beneficial to be in nature when you are attempting to capture it in all of its glory.
Plein Air Painting at RRC
Last Friday, my friend and I packed all our painting equipment in the car and set out for the Randell Research Center on Pine Island. We have been there other years so it was not new to us. She planned to use two 10″ x 20″ canvasses as a diptych because the 18″ x 18″ canvasses which she had ordered had not arrived yet. I had a 30″ x 30″ canvas that I wanted to use.
After 2 hours or so of plein air painting, we were ready to call it a day. She had used only one of her canvasses to paint a shell mound and it was completely covered with paint. (That’s the first objective - to get the canvas completely covered!) I chose a grouping of palm trees with a few deciduous trees nearby. My drawing was finished and some photos taken. I had started painting the grass and mulch around the trees - going from bottom to top of the canvas - not my usual method. I’ll have plenty more to do on this painting back home in the studio!
The Randell Research Center
The Randell Research center (RRC) is a program of the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, Florida, which has conducted research and educational programs in Southwest Florida for over 20 years. The RRC existed since 1994 when Donald and Patricia Randell gifted 53 +/- acres of the 200 acre Pineland archeological site to the University of Florida Foundation.
With more than 28 million specimens and artifacts in its permanent collections, the Florida Museum is the largest collections based natural history museum in the southern United States. These collections are the foundation of the Museum’s scientific research and university teaching programs. The Museum also uses these collections to inspire and educate the public about Florida’s natural history and rich cultural heritage.
On a recent Heritage Day the theme was “Art, Authors and Archeology”. Landscape artists were doing plein air paintings, an author was selling his books, and archeologists were having children sift sand from the Indian mound through a 20″ x 20″ screen to show them how archeologists research the life and times of the Indians.