Art Blog - What Makes A Painting Work

"Nothing but blue skies from now on," is marvelous as a song lyric or as a description of perfect vacation weather, but rather risky as a painting strategy. Solid blue skies shout. They make statements. They take over. Avoid them as you would avoid a pushy but boring guest at a social gathering. Skies can add to the harmony of a composition. Color and pattern are both important. When you look at sky in a photograph taken on a clear day, it presents a rather solid even blue. The real skies overhead send all matter of colors bouncing back at your eyes. Thus skies can benefit from touches of other colors in the palette that you use for that particular painting… Continue reading… 2 comments

Sometimes the grand elements of a particular place are so impressive that they are painted by seemingly every artist that passes through. Meanwhile other potential painting ideas may be ignored. For example, California's Pigeon Point Lighthouse is one of the most attractive and painted of the Pacific Coast lighthouses. At a juried show I attended a few months ago, I saw a painting of Pigeon Point that captured only the rocky point below the lighthouse. It was an attractive and powerful portrayal of waves crashing upon the rugged rocks, and it was an award winner. The artist had looked at the famous locale from a slightly different and fresh viewpoint… Continue reading… 0 comments

Painting is about light. Art portraying dusk to the darkest night deals with light in three interesting ways. There are works give us only the natural light of the night, largely dependent on moonlight but even the ambient light of a moonless night has form if few hints of color. It takes a deft handling of color and value to depict that soft world of dusk or of moonglow. Moonless or clouded nights are largely value studies. Two masters of the night who painted in California's central coast region approximately a century ago are Charles Rollo Peters and Gottardo Piazzoni. Artificial light may be the focal point or the theme of the painting. Sometimes this is the glowy cottages of Thomas Kincaid, and the window lights on a Christmas card scene… Continue reading… 3 comments

Landscapes can range from realistic to symbolic or abstract. Color treatment is a factor in the level of realism. There are landscapes which reflect local color, which show an understanding of light in a particular region and season. These paintings can "take you there", bringing to mind the smells and sounds of a familiar locale through the visual signals. The dancing light of the most impressionist of Impressionists such as Monet, asks the viewer to look beyond the obvious and generalized color instead of seeing the color of an object as a solid unchanging block. Fauve painters added a pulsing color beat to their works, intensifying and often entirely changing the natural colors. They invite a passionate response to their scenes… Continue reading… 3 comments

Painting people is a pleasure, and art lovers usually enjoy paintings with humans portrayed in them. After completing a recent watercolor of two children exploring a sea star and barnacle bedecked rock at low tide, I gave some thought to portraits, figure painting, and the market. There is definitely a market for portraits of celebrities, and portraits by master painters from the past can command large figures when they come on the market. Surely the Mona Lisa is one of the world's most cherished and visited paintings, and one cannot imagine any circumstances that the Louvre would let go of it_thus placing it in the category of "priceless". However, I think in the more ordinary world of art marketing, the successful portraitist works largely on commission… Continue reading… 2 comments

Dirt, rocks, gravel, clay, silt, stone: these words usually call to mind tones of brown and gray but the earth often contains tones of vibrant color. Light them with sun, split them open with nature's own violent disruptions, wash them with water, or polish them, and how they sparkle. I know many water colorists who avoid the earth pigments for more transparent choices, but traditionally the two sources of color were earth and plant dyes, with plants most often ephemeral. Of course there might be the occasional beetle thrown in! Certainly the earth colors: the ochres, umbers, siennas, for example, are ideal on the palette when painting rocks… Continue reading… 2 comments

When you paint, make me believe. A painting attempts to take a flat plane and make us believe images of a three dimensional world. The artist, like the fiction writer, needs to create a willing suspension of disbelief. For years the wild sunsets often seen in paintings in British and American landscapes from the late 1800s struck me as a fantasy element. I had no problem enjoying the paintings because there was an internal consistency. Under those multihued sunsets and towering cloud formations, deep shadows and rosy or orange hued highlights built beautiful, larger than life landscapes… Continue reading… 2 comments

After deciding which slice of the world will make a good landscape composition, a second problem to be worked out is how much detail to show. When I saw these ducks sitting in the sun on a weathered boardwalk bridge rail at Neary Lagoon I was struck by their bright beauty. There was no doubt they were the stars of the scene. They would make a lovely watercolor painting by themselves. Yet I was also struck by patterns which spoke of the rich complexity of the landscape. The weathered wood had a lavender tone where it had been exposed by the peeling paint, and revealed growth patterns in the wood as the paint held to some layers better than to others. The ducks themselves had an array of colors in their feathers although the male's head and wings made them clearly identifiable as mallards… Continue reading… 3 comments

Primary colors attract us from the nursery on up. They are not boring. I read some time back of a gallery owner who said that paintings with each of the three primary colors in them were most likely to sell. I don't know how wide spread this experiences. Perhaps the big three in the world of color used together give the viewer a sense of wholeness, of balance and harmony in the universe. Perhaps they are just bright and jolly and make us want to smile and kick like that infant in the nursery. Used as all or the major part of a painting strong primaries are exciting. If your painting has been feeling a bit tired, doing a few works strictly in a palette of primaries may be just what you need to shake your art up a bit. Even a small work in primary colors can shout yoo-hoo! across a room… Continue reading… 5 comments