Figure on Blue
Oil on Board
January 16, 2012
$200.00 CAN
Figure on Orange
Oil on Board
January 14, 2012
$200.00 CAN
Driven Landscape
Oil on Canvas
12" x 10"
January 14, 2012
$250.00 CAN
This past January The Paint Spot in Edmonton had an excellent idea to raise funds for new lighting for their gallery space. The Naess Gallery has been promoting local artists for a long time. Many years ago they gave me and a few of my peers at University the opportunity to show our work. It was a great experience as a fellow artist and myself were in charge of organizing the show. It taught me a lot about how to submit work to galleries and how to talk to the public about my work. It was an invaluable experience that I will never forget.
This painting project was very interesting and I hope that they continue and make this an annual event. The Paint Spot asked artists to bring in their unfinished paintings and exchange them for other unfinished paintings which you then take and use as a ground for the creation of a completed painting to contribute to the show. I love the idea of someone creating a challenging ground to work from.
The above paintings I see as great successes. Figure on Blue was originally a wiped out landscape which was mostly a gray blue with a bridge in the middle. I left bits of the gray blue in parts of the figure. Figure in Orange was originally just the orange background which I put a very thin layer of green on the top to give it depth and make the skin colors glow. I enjoy how the colors vibrated against each other. The last, Driven Landscape, was a landscape with a winding walking path down the middle. I kept the trees and sky and emphasized them, manipulating the sky line, added a road and placed my car in the foreground.
I have always found that it is harder to work from a white canvas. Now with plenty of years of painting experience behind me I know that I always need to start by creating some sort of ground to work from. I cannot start a painting from a white ground, it needs to be loved up first. It doesn't matter if you just smear a bunch of paint on it no matter what color or how many colors, you just need to start of with something. White is too bright and in painting especially in oils, one usually leaves the white highlights to the end of the painting process (though there is always an exception to the rules).
The above paintings I see as great successes. Figure on Blue was originally a wiped out landscape which was mostly a gray blue with a bridge in the middle. I left bits of the gray blue in parts of the figure. Figure in Orange was originally just the orange background which I put a very thin layer of green on the top to give it depth and make the skin colors glow. I enjoy how the colors vibrated against each other. The last, Driven Landscape, was a landscape with a winding walking path down the middle. I kept the trees and sky and emphasized them, manipulating the sky line, added a road and placed my car in the foreground.
I have always found that it is harder to work from a white canvas. Now with plenty of years of painting experience behind me I know that I always need to start by creating some sort of ground to work from. I cannot start a painting from a white ground, it needs to be loved up first. It doesn't matter if you just smear a bunch of paint on it no matter what color or how many colors, you just need to start of with something. White is too bright and in painting especially in oils, one usually leaves the white highlights to the end of the painting process (though there is always an exception to the rules).
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