Posts Tagged ‘Oil Paintings’
The Landscape Painter’s Vision
Happy New Year, everyone! Do you ever wander back to that time when you first started thinking about making art? Do you ever think of the vision that you first had – how your art would be made, its themes, its looks? How simple it was then. For some of us it was just a matter of learning the skills and enacting our vision.
Then with a little seasoning under our belts, we modified, changed, expanded, contracted. We grew – or perhaps regressed. We landscape painters are constantly faced with forks in our roads – and the realization that some of the paths we take are a genuine pressing ahead with our dreams, and others a caving into demands and the easy backslide into mediocrity. It’s sometimes possible to confuse creativity with compromise.
Perhaps it’s a matter of figuring out what is true. Take a break regularly and reassess where you are going, review whether you are doing what you truly like and want to do. What are you doing right? What is uniquely yours? Which subjects and stylistic elements give you satisfaction?
Go back to your dreams. Feel the evolution since the beginning as a natural unfolding. Think of misguided moves only as potholes and part of the process. Breathe deeply, be thankful and be true to your true self.
How to Critique Yourself – for the Plein Air Painter
Robert Genn, Canadian plein air painter, in his November 18, 2011 newsletter, answered someone’s question about how to critique one’s own work. Here, in part is his answer:
Quality develops when the artist and the critic are honed into a functioning co-op within the same skull. The “ritual” is to pry the artist away from the critic. The artist can be flamboyant, egocentric and prejudiced. The critic needs to be patient, humble and strict. A split personality may be the price you have to pay to see your work through fresh, unsullied eyes. The operation doesn’t hurt–much.
Divorcing yourself from the preciousness of your efforts and seeing your work as it really is takes time and mileage. This means “alone time” in your working area. No quality work or strong direction will arise in environments where consultants are readily available.
A valuable ploy is to constantly upgrade and rethink standards of excellence, most often done through books and other media. The mere act of holding onto great works or seeing them in museums magically transfers a sense of timelessness and creative soul. Fact is, you will not generally improve by misguided staring at your own efforts.
Creativity for the Abstract Painter – Part 2
Here are a few more ideas about creativity that might help the artist who creates abstract paintings. Again, from Dr. Amabile’s report.
People are happiest when they come up with a creative idea, but they’re more likely to have a breakthrough if they were happy the day before. When people are excited about their work, there is a better chance that they will make a cognitive association that incubates overnight and shows up as a creative idea the next day. One day’s happiness often predicts the next day’s creativity.
The most creative teams are those that have the confidence to share and debate ideas. When people are doing work that they love and they are allowed to deeply engage in it – and when the work itself is valued and recognized – then creativity will flourish.
Creativity for the Abstract Painter
Several years ago, Theresa Amabile, researcher and professor at Harvard Business School, completed a study about creativity. Some of her findings may be useful to painters of abstract paintings as well as others.
Folks get creatively engaged when they have a sense of playful progress. People are most creative when they care about their work and are stretching their skills. It happens over a period of time – one day to the next in a cooperative environment can produce more creativity than the hot expectation of a bonus.
People are the least creative when they are fighting the clock. When people are working under pressure, their creativity goes down not only on that day but for the next two days as well. Creativity requires an incubation period; people need time to soak in a problem and let the ideas bubble up.
Making Your Mark
Throughout history artists have made their marks, some simply by the force of their creative genius or the tunnel vision of their obsession. Pablo Picasso made his presence known amidst the foment of the 20th century scene. His fellow artists took notice immediately, followed by the general public. “Picasso” practically became synonymous with the term artist.
It is not necessary for a viewer to be familiar with the political situation in early 19th century Spain in order to understand Goya’s The Third of May, 1808. Knowing the troops are French and the unarmed civilians are citizens of Madrid does not matter. Goya’s painting was timely and served a political purpose, but it transcends any specific event. It addresses the horrors of war on a more universal level.
Some artists leave their marks with all the subtlety of a train wreck, while others do so with quiet introspection. Some capture the universal imagination while others poke more specific nerves. Perhaps the essence of an artist’s mark is that it must have meaning, that it belongs only to that individual, and that it communicates something of importance, whether it does so with a whisper that resonates through history, or a bright flash that creates only a momentary jolt.
Jumpstarting Creativity
In his book “Creative Landscape Painting,” Edward Betts mentions many ways to jumpstart an artist’s landscape painting creativity. Here are a few: Using a low horizon gives an unexpected, unequal relationship of ground to sky and it creates a feeling of great height and expanse of open space, upward into the sky and deep into the far distance. A high horizon is for the artist who wants to express the feeling of looking down on his subject – as if seen from a hilltop, mountain, tree or high window.
The upward view, as though looking up into the branches of a tree, might be a fresh viewpoint and have dramatic design possibilities. Another variation is to purposely introduce foreground details and keep the principal subject in the middle ground or background – as though looking at boats in a bay through two trees. This is an art of understatement in which the painter refuses to paint the subject in full view for all to see immediately. Instead, he partially hides it behind the foreground details and draws the viewer into the picture at a slower rate.
John Losonczy
Today was John Losonczy’s 90th birthday! He was born in Budapest and came to the US in 1961. He was a pharmacist in Hungary, but when he came to the US, he studied art.
I met John when I came to Salisbury, MD, in 2002. He was a teacher at the Institute & Gallery and I became his student for a few years until he and his wife were in an auto accident 2 or 3 years ago.
Today John’s daughter had a luncheon for him and invited all of his students. There were perhaps 15 of us loyal students who had studied with him for several years. It was wonderful to spend time with my former teacher and classmates and to see many of his paintings hung throughout the daughter’s house. We all adored John because he knew just how to correct our paintings. We secretly called him “Variation John” because if we ever painted a straight line in a landscape painting, he would correct it and make it varied. We all wish John many more birthdays!
The Artist’s Response
Determining the subject for a landscape painting is only the beginning, according to Edward Betts in his book Creative Landscape Painting. The next step is to clearly identify and then sustain whatever your initial response was. If you know exactly what it was that struck you so forcefully, then it will be easier to project that particular quantity with force and clarity in your painting.
Was it color, light, pattern, space, weather, mood, or shape relationships? Beauty is too vague a term. Besides the description of beauty lies in the terms already mentioned.
It is important to cling to the original conception as you begin to search for the best methods to communicate your own interest in the subject, especially as you get deeper into the development of the picture. If you can hang onto what you originally wanted to say, you will be in full control of your painting at all times and you will have a firm rationale behind all your pictorial decisions while your painting is in progress.
Decorating Your Home With Style
Bring nature indoors by hanging wildlife art prints on your walls. You can also place other nature-inspired items in your living area. These include wooden sculptures, vases and figurines made of pottery clay.
Other ways to bring nature indoors include
~ Placing a bunch of fresh wildflowers in a vase.
~ Choosing Landscape oil painting
~ Decorate your living room with various shapes and sizes of pots and jars.
Copper as Support
Perhaps the only thing better than using Iridescent Copper Light (fine) for the underpainting of a landscape painting would be to use the real thing – copper. In the September 2011 issue of The Artist’s Magazine, Meredith Lewis has written about artist Kent Lovelace who actually uses copper as his support.
Lovelace wanders about Europe finding inspiring vistas to photograph and later crop for the perfect scenes. The copper surface must be clean and free from oxidation so he sands it with 60-grit sandpaper and wipes it with alcohol. Then he creates a monochromatic underpainting to work out the composition, textures and values using Old Holland neutral tint. Color glazing follows using only transparent or translucent paints. The layers are thin so the radiance of the copper shows through. Later when he works on the sky he leaves some of the area unpainted so that the bare copper is exposed. The result is a painting which glows with an inner luminosity reminiscent of Rembrandt, El Greco and hundreds of others. For more information on working with copper, visit http://www.copper.org .