Art Blog - What Makes A Painting Work

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… 3 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… 1 comment

Western Art presents plentiful examples of excellent use of black and white: ink drawings by PIcasso, photos by Ansel Adams, the best of the motion pictures' early decades are but a few examples. It is in Chinese and Japanese Brush painting that the varying shades of black or gray are actually called colors. The classic paintings of China and Japan range from simple bamboo shoots to complex landscapes. What they have in common is the power of color within the blue black or brown black that is used. We see this also in modern masters such as Xu Beihong whose horses I particularly admire http://www.xubeihong.org/ In working with the ink I love the subtle shades made possible depending on the amount of water in the ink and in the brush… Continue reading… 1 comment

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… 4 comments