Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Series Work

Hello, Everyone. I am not in the studio today; but, I do have photos of progress on my 12" x 12" panel series. I haven't found a thread to hold it all together as a concept or color or design. I'm still working on that but not too hard.

Of the 6 panels I started several weeks ago, I believe 3 or finished. I will give you a little tour of the process these three took by starting with one.

In this first image, I was laying out shapes of different sizes and establishing some high contrast areas. I was not thinking about content or color and my application of paint was loose using whatever was on my palette. I believe at this stage, I imagined mountains in the background far in the distance at the top.


The next photo shows the painting after I applied an all-over orange-red glaze. Very bright in the mid-value range.


With everything at mid- to very dark value, I needed to bring back some light areas and I decided to make those larger in size:


With this version, I started to see green water and I stopped seeing the mountains. The triangles became boats and I added color to the edge of the large cocoon on the right and found the boat theme clearly coming forward. So I turned it around and emphasized a dark lagoon. Still very dark-ish orange.


I began to paint in some very light areas with a yellow gold azo transparent acrylic with white tint. This helped quite a bit...yet it felt pretty garish to me for a few days as I tried to figure out what to do next.

Eventually, I toned down the chartreuse green to indicate a burnt-grass environment around a boat harbor. I added the text on the yellow area but want to tone down that obvious addition. So the last version is what I came up with and called it done.
It still looks a bit muddy in the yellow area as a mid-value; but I had to allow the orange to stand out as a focus color. The very light and pale yellow along the edges of two boats and the round 'things' I hope create the kind of contrasts that draw the viewer's eye around the painting.

I will keep working on these boat images because they keep appearing without my calling them forward. Still not a consistent theme with the 6 boards though.

Comments? Please jump into the conversation about the process.

Have a great week.

2 comments:

  1. Eileen, This is really just a test to make sure I can, in fact, post a comment. It appears to work just fine - thanks!
    Love you....

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  2. So, now I'd like to comment on this work process that you did many months ago. I really like the way you showed and talked me through your process. I confess that sometimes I don't understand the art 'product' but following your thoughts and practices this way really helped me. I sometimes don't dare say, "I see a boat in there" because I think it is somehow "wrong" and you know I don't like to be wrong. ;) For you to say it, and then develop it, helped me to feel open about what I was watching come to life. I think I get now, at least a teeny bit, how the images speak to you and call out to be created, much like writing when a character or plot seems to present itself rather than the author/artist forcing it into being. It's always more satisfying to be the vessel for life to come in whatever form. Thank you for sharing all this, really!

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