John is a landscape painter who occasionally goes out to paint with me. I photographed him and painted this in the studio, with the help of a colour study completed that day in the park.
Painting in the Park
Petticoat Creek Conservation Area
oil on board
11×14
A few drawings from the TSA today, 5-15min.
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Here is the three hour pose from this afternoon.
Spring Walk
Petticoat Creek Conservation Area
oil on board
11×14
Drawings from today, 5 to 15 minutes, except for the top drawing which is from the afternoon three hour pose.
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This week, in an attempt to shake things up, I took a 5-day workshop entitled “Figurative Abstraction in Acrylic” taught by the accomplished Brian Smith. Brian is a very good teacher who is eager to share his extensive knowledge of art and composition. Each day began with two slide shows introducing us to new artists and to some important concepts of abstract painting.
Both abstraction and acrylics were intimidating. It wasn’t easy to let go of the control that I cherish as a realist artist working in oil. So much of the mark making and medium application is random, and I’m not sure how comfortable I am with that. On the other hand, working with house painting brushes and slapping on thick layers of quick drying paint has a certain appeal. How much of this I’ll be incorporating into my work is hard to say.
Here are two of my better paintings from this week. Each is acrylic on watercolour paper — the first has some chalk pastel in there as well.
For this first one, we had to work on an active ground, which meant painting a figure on top of an abstract coloured pattern that we painted beforehand. We had to leave some of this ground show through in the final work. Here you can see the active ground in the torso of the figure (the gray-green, yellow-orange, and black), the white and purple stripes in the leg, and in some of the background.
For the second one, a dancing model served as inspiration. She danced continuously as we sketched her on newsprint. From those, we had to compose a painting. As she danced, I had this vision of clouds in a blue sky and so went with that kind of colour scheme.
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I tried out Mylar again today. It’s not easy to control charcoal on plastic! The pan pastel did glide beautifully on it, and I love the tactile feel of smudging the medium on the page with my fingers. But I also learned not to overdo it — oily charcoaled fingerprints stain Mylar.
Michaela was the model today, for both the long and short poses.
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Yesterday, I decided to go to the TSA for their evening drawing session. Here are some of my drawings of Geneviève.
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I finally received my order of black Pan Pastel! Because of David Kassan, these have been in demand recently, and he’s the reason I wanted it too. I love his drawings and I’m playing around with his technique. Here is one, drawn at the TSA this afternoon.
