Yesterday's Painting

I am overwhelmed with all of your responses to my 1500th blip yesterday. Wow. My photo has been on the spotlight page all day. A huge thank you to all who came by to give me comments, stars and hearts. THANK YOU!

This is the painting I worked on yesterday in open studio. I am still in the middle. I got lots of advice when I showed you this version of the painting last week. Some even said, "stop now." I understand where that comes from as I myself love the freshness of the first strokes and want to learn to preserve that freshness. In fact that is my 2014 artistic resolution, to stay fresh throughout the painting.

If you were to see the actual painting in its original state, you would find that there was almost no paint on the canvas. Most of that gold and red was the original gesso I use to prime my canvas. I create the passages of dark and light using Venetian red and gold gesso. I do it quickly and with verve and that is what shows. But the painting is just started. I want to keep that sense of movement and freshness as I add paint and move toward the final result. Here I've added a bit more dark to the left to emphasize the bright sky and water on the right. I softened the contrasts in the sky as well. Some of that may come back as I get into the end stage of the painting.

A brief lesson: our teacher makes us declare where we are in our painting, beginning, middle or end. Each stage has it's own character.

In the beginning the job is to cover the canvas, create passages of dark and light and define the composition. This is the time to look for compositional mistakes and to make sure that you have passages of dark and light. It is a time when you want to emphasize the similarities in the parts of the painting, not the differences. No detail at all yet.

The middle is when you paint. You begin to show the differences between parts of the same passage. There might be really dark sections you want to define as well as middle dark or even close the middle gray, all of these in your dark passage. So now it begins to break up but maintains its essential darkness. Ditto with the light passage creating areas from high light to middle gray. Here is where you spend most of your time painting.

The end is for final flourishes and details. In this painting, for example, I might add some of the cables of the bridge. I might add some bright spots in the sky. I would be looking for the "wow factor" to complete the painting in such a way that a person walking along and spotting it would stop to look more closely. They would want to stay awhile and might even thingk, "wow!"

End of lesson. :) Another busy day until now with a couple of appointments beginning early in the day. Now for some quiet time. Ahhh.