Archive for the ‘landscape’ Category

Channeling Wolf Kahn

I am practicing with pastels lately, getting ready for a workshop with Wolf Kahn. He is a well-known American landscape painter that pioneered the melding of color field, abstract expressionism and impressionist landscape painting. He excels in using intense, seemingly unnatural colors, that perfectly express the light and weather effects of his subject matter. This weekend he is holding a workshop in pastel at the Yellow Barn Studio and, so to be prepared, I have done a few works of which this is the best example. Since you can’t mix pastels very easily you have to have a good selection of colors. Here I am using Sennelier pastels on a very rough white paper. This forces you to work on broad generalizations and not sweat the details. I like how this work conveys a sense of mysterious deep space behind the shed. The color of the inside of the door is different then the outside which looks a bit strange when the door is open but makes for a more interesting work.

Getting Back on the Path

This is a revision of a previous work (see February 12). I had painted over the original with large ‘x’ like shapes that looked like freeways. Mostly I did this out of frustration hoping that if I did any crazy thing that that something would come out of it. Of course it looked crappy. But I had kept a photo of it at an earlier stage  and after a while thought it didn’t look so bad. So I just repainted it to match the original, making improvements where they seemed to make sense. Hope you like it

Painting en Plein Aire

Just a small sketch done along the C& O Canal on a 10″ x 10″ square canvas executed mostly with palette knife. Its funny how all the trees lean inwards towards the canal to reach the light. I plan to do a lot more of these small canvases with simple compositions focusing mostly on color. They had a sale on this size canvases anyway.

Viewing the world through yellow-tinted glasses

The subject is a view from the backyard. Though most of the year the forsythia looks scraggly and doesn’t do I good job of blocking the view of the neighbor’s yard, they justify themselves in early spring when they explode with color. One very brilliant spring day I was impressed how blue the rest of the world looked through the brilliant yellow blooms. Spring is an odd time with strong contrasts, some places still look wintery and other places like summer is in full swing. I started this painting several years ago but left it unfinished but this time around it seemed to finish itself.

Hanging a Louie

A recent painting from a source photo of downtown Bethesda. I worked out the composition first using graphite powder on a large sheet of heavy paper, sealed it, then added several layers of acrylic paint using both modeling paste for texture and painting medium for glazing. Except for a few changes for the purpose of composition, the photograph was followed closely and portrays relatively accurately the view north on Wisconsin Avenue approaching East-West Highway. I like to think that the yellow building in the background is posing a dilemma to the viewer entering the painting, veer right towards the darkness or left towards the light? And from the signs posted it is clear there is no turning around.

What I have been working on

This is a rather large piece (40″ x 30″) that was based on a photograph which I used previously for a small sketch (see January 5th).I find these larger canvases a challenge to keep the whole thing holding together. With smaller canvases, I have a feel for the whole thing, maybe because you can see everything at the same time  when working at arm’s length. But with a larger canvas, the work needs to be done piecemeal. In this case, I first worked on the buildings, then on the foreground, then on the sky, etc. but rarely worked on the piece as a whole. There a quite a few layers here as I tried to work out the kinks in the composition. Though the original photograph has a river in the foreground, during the painting process, the river dried out and a figure appeared, who seems to be looking up at the city spread out before him with amazement and some dismay. The painting seemed to demand a more illustrative approach in order to tell this story.

Seeing things

Another attempt at abstraction..starting with blues and oranges and intersecting shapes, which led to a repetition of triangular shapes. Shortly after I took this photo, the painting coalesced into a small seaside new england town, replete with sailboats, a lighthouse, well maintained white clapboard houses and church with freshly painted blue roofs. And of course the requisite autumn foliage. I mean that I saw this in my mind but once I had that image there I couldn’t maintain the integrity of the work. At least as an abstract. And I didn’t really have enough information to paint representationally. And it sort of fell apart. But at least I have this photo. And maybe I can resurrect this stage again, which, though not finished, is sort of interesting.

Abstracted

Starting with a simple design of horizontal planes and intersecting lines and a few ideas for color, I began to randomly fill in with flat color just to see where it would lead. At some point it seemed that pink had to dominate. I got looser with the paint, using a palette knife. Purples and blue contrasted nicely with that. It seem like a pleasant design but looking a little flat. Something had to go in the foreground. A few quickly drawn black lines and daubed-in white and gray shapes and an ancient civilization seemed to sprout instantly off the rocky cliffs. I began to wonder, what was their means of sustenance? I had such a storyline built up around this that I don’t think I could finish the picture. I ended up painting much of what you see above with what looked like a huge freeway (not shown). More on this later.

Cream Popsicle

When the snow first hit the DC region, little did we know what was coming. It looked so pretty at the time. I loved how bright the colors of street signs looked in a world otherwise devoid of color. A week later, we were so tired of of the 3 plus feet of snow that had fallen, who wanted to take photos of it?

Drawing on the Imagination

This is the result of a class I am taking called “Abstract Representation” taught by Jordan Bruns at the Yellow Barn Studio in Glen Echo, MD. Jordan is a new teacher at the school and maintains a studio there as well. I had been fascinated by his large swirling drawings and paintings that start with random marks or paint drippings but then turn into vast ancient ruins that don’t exactly obey the laws of gravity but seem real enough to get lost in. I started this work by covering a large sheet of heavy paper with a coating of powdered graphite. All the marks on it were made by erasing away the graphite to the white of the paper. I then went back in with more powdered graphite applied with a Q-tip. Somewhere along the way the random markings I made begin to turn into images–buildings,trees and clouds. Eventually this drawing coalesced into a scene of  a strange city at night. It is interesting how this process works; you start with seemingly nonobjective marks on paper and then suddenly memories and experiences start to come up. It seems the trick is to wait until the right image comes along, the one that won’t minimize the abstract power of the work but harmonize with it.