Artistic Struggle

Trying new mediums is one of my artistic goals this year. I am comfortable with oils, love the rich colors and butter feel of working with high-grade professional oils. I love them! I have no intentions of abandoning them.

But I have never really painted with anything else. Oh I have toyed with watercolor. Who hasn't today? But they are a bit unforgiving, and in my early days of painting, I needed a lot of forgiving!

Still do for that matter, but that is another story.

With this spring’s Fine Arts Exhibition, and my own earlier sickness, I really did not have time to fully develop 3 oil paintings, so necessity has forced me to actually keep my goal for this year. I hate to admit it, but although I have always wanted to try other things, I am a bit of a coward, and was reluctant to strike out. Especially I did not want to show anyone my struggles!


So, as usual, I have reverse order over most artists. Instead of starting with watercolor and acrylics, I started with oils, and will work my way backwards!



Acrylics

As it would happens, the local hobby shop had a sale on artist quality acrylics this week. The dye was cast.

Acrylics are texturally very different from oils. While I knew, intellectually, this would be true, I don’t think you are every ready for it in practice.

But I digress.

I needed 2 more paintings and I needed them fast, at least to dry fast to give me maximum time to dry. I also wanted to change things up a bit, try for something different. Acrylics was as close to an answer as I was going to find.

For the first painting I decided to try something a bit more graphic, less detailed and flatter. Usually, I work hard at creating depth in my landscapes, but this time I was going to use non-local color and a more abstract style. I worked out my thumbnail, and sketches, and with vine charcoal placed just the basic shapes. This is all I intended to paint, block in the basic shapes.

I used a limited pallet of Violet, Yellow Ochre and White. To achieve any distinction between objects I had to manipulate the values of these pigments, darkening some and lightening some. Mixing them together would give me the grays to add some shading.

Mixing Paint

These paints were much softer than I was used to, and a bit tricky to mix. For the first time I had to worry about drying times, not in hours and days, but in minutes. Usually I spread my paints widely, into rather thin strips. but if you do this with acrylics they dry before you can use them. Also, keeping a spray bottle at hand is a good idea. There are medium you can use to delay this drying time, but naturally, I had none of these! In addition, my standard pallet knife seemed awkward with them. I persevered, I did find a small plastic spoon was a better mixing tool.

The resulting painting is a 12 x 12 square, another departure for me. I tend to stick with what I am comfortable with, and work either in standard landscapes sizes of 18 x 24 or with miniature sizes of about 4x5. So even the format is outside my comfort zone.

The second painting is again a modified landscape, again in acrylics. This is a waterfall of sorts. Large graphic rocks splashed with rapids of an active stream, but with found colors dominating. Emphasizing the blue of the water and the red-orange rock colors, the painting does not try to convey a realism that is more typical of my artwork, but a warmer, more whimsical interpretation of rocks in a stream. Again, this has a limited pallet. Here I worked with a mid-blue and its complementary orange with white. The sky blends into to the river and flows over the rocks whipping up the spray onto the bank.

Even the first trial and error blocking in did let me work with the medium. While I would not call the painting a roaring success, even our failures teach us something. I strongly believe that without the failures you cannot achieve real success. Well, I have the failures now!

While there is a certain amount of success in these paintings, they are far from masterpieces. These paintings are not really very good, from a purely artistic standpoint. But they represent the struggle, the attempt to mastery of a medium and of artwork. They are simply steps along the way. Some of the many hundreds need to complete the journey from painter to artist.

Red-Green Composition

This spring the show theme or challenge however you want to look at it is color complements. So the painting has to be predominately done in a primary color and its complement. For this paintings I chose the red-green color complements, and will use Cadmium red and sap green plus titanium white. These, I think will give me the range of colors and shades I need to do this work.

As you can see, even this limited pallet gives a full range of values. Red-green giving a really rich brown, which can be darked with more of either color or lightened by adding white.

After blocking in the major areas of the painting with paint thinned with mineral spirits, I began adding the gross details, locating and starting to shade in the background trees and vegetation and laying in some of the rough shapes of the rocks that will bracket the falls. I like to work in a impressionistic way at this point, simply laying in colors and letting them blend on the canvas itself. For this I use larger brushes, 1" flats, and 1/2" filbert. Once the basic shapes are in, and I am getting a range of values, I used a script brush to simply flick through the paint to give an impression of tree branches. With some large thin blocks of color I can give the idea that there are building beyond the park, but I don't have to give them any details, this will all be covered by the trees.

With a small painting knife I began building up some of the values that will make the rocks have depth and texture. This is one of the biggest challenges of this painting, as the sandstone of the park has a real rich range of color tones, and for this painting to work both the colors of the rocks and the warmth of the day will need to come through.

I laid in the seated man in red, but will as the painting progesses I will add more and more green to him. After the rapid waters of the falls are added, the darker values of the green will give him a sharper contrast to the foaming water and tie him into the foreground vegetation. I have added the painting as it is after the first painting session. Tomorrow I will beginning to define and finish the background and move onto perfecting the rocks and adding the spray and foam of the falls themselves.

The background is pretty much done, I like the way it looks very wild and unkempt. And I thing the rocks work. Now I just have to get the water to have both depth and foam. A real challenge. But over all I think it is coming along very well.

What is missing so far? Depth to the water, details to the foreground and shading and shadows to the man. This will show the light souce and help the painting hang together. I also think the river looks uninteresting like this. It needs to look more active, containing more life, as it truly does. Although it very rocky in this place, there is a great deal of vegetation cropping up all around.

Now I feel the falls looks more active and real.