What is a portrait

This Portrait by Vincent Van Gogh depicts an over worked, overburdened Dr Gachet.  The light, slightly translucent colors against the darker, deeper colors of his jacket create the feeling of a ghostly figure.  The Dr seems to be barely holding on, searching for something to believe in.  The flowers on the table seem to be strained, not yet wilting.  The Dr's face is clearly the focus of the painting and the saturated colors shadowing the lighter, less saturated colors promotes the sense of tiredness, exhaustion in the Dr.  The objects in the painting consist of flowers, books, Dr Gachet and a bleak background, creating a very work oriented image.    

White on White Painting

White on White Sketches

White on White Setup

Dalí Himself

The Dalí Bone Collection

 
 
 

Sense of Place

This painting by Edward Hopper gives the mood of an urban home. Very rich but the woman in the painting looks unfulfilled as if there is something missing form her life. The painting by Andrew Wyeth gives a very different mood. The mood is more the simple life of the country. This painting and its mood seem to embody what the woman form the other painting is longing for, whether she is aware of it or not.

Where I'm At

The most challenging part of this course so far for me has been creating the illusion of depth while creating clearly defined shapes and realistic colors. I have worked on taking my outlines where there is a sense of depth and refining the shapes while maintaining the depth in the painting. My white on white painting for example had depth but when I tried to bring the shapes out more and make them clearing, the painting lost some of its depth. I have progressed though and i now feel the painting has depth and defined shapes. I have also become more comfortable with the effects of different pressures and brushstrokes. In my first oil painting of the course, I painted an orange set on a background of pink tissue paper. I experimented with different types of brushes, eventually settling on a cheap brush with mangled bristles. I have more experience now and have a better sense of how different materials will react and behave. Looking at painting by past artists allows us to observe and learn form what they did. We can also see how different techniques behaved. I learned form the paintings by Van Gogh how different vivid colors reacted together and how bland can go well with bright. It was very helpful and inspiring to gaze upon these great works by some of the celebrated, and not celebrated, masters of the past.

The Persistance of Memory

This painting was made by Salvador Dali, who happens to e one of my favorite artists. He creates depth by making the foreground extremely dark in comparison to the background. He uses bright colors, not many hues, most saturated. The color blue is recurring in the painting. The clocks in the painting seem to be malting and one is hanging from a tree. It seems to put an eerie spin on the element of time, challenging the very existence of it. Dali painted the picture in 1931. With this painting, Dali introduced challenges of accepted concepts and new parallel ways of thinking.          

Surface and texture

    

    
These paintings create the illusion of surface and texture. These artists create this illusion by using very realistic color combinations and highly skilled blending techniques. They use white skillfully to create highlights and use dark, saturated colors to create value. The highlights generally consist of hues.

Composition

Composition is a very useful tool. When a paintings colors are all very similar colors composition can be the very thing that holds the painting together, which gives it meaning and draws you in.

The Van man and Mor

Nothing really struck me as interesting or artistic or skillfully done in Morandi's paintings, but as I looked at them longer i opened my mind.  I saw them through different eyes.

I saw them through a child's eyes, through a colorblind persons eyes.  I saw them through rain and glass, and through these different lenses the beauty shown threw to me.  The paleness and similarity of colors and the shake edges all seem so bland when glanced at and taken in at face value.  But when viewed and grasped as the work of it truly is then it becomes vivid and expressive.  Expressing emotions, emotions running down the edges of the bottles, hazing the edges and the lines if they were there.  The backgrounds expresses the same alternative sight aspect to them. 

As for Van Gogh, I enjoyed his paintings from the moment I took them in.  I welcomed the sheer, simple beauty and vivacity of them.  His paintings seem almost as if they are mosaics.  The colors jump out at you and are simply beautiful, bright, deep blues spilling from the painting into the reaches of reality.  Deep greens filling the void that is the unreality behind paintings.  The blend they share, and the deep stretches of colors and hues saturating until they become a completely different color, no longer the hue it started as.  The orange in Sunflowers reflects light from the sun itself,  The yellow squeezed from the sun and the highlights from the stars.  The plant itself grows out of the vase, out of the picture.  Growing into our world and out into the next.  His two paintings are so different yet so similar, both vivid expressions of life and beauty, both vividly beautiful.

Color Mixing Chart

What I know

The primary colors are red, blue and yellow. The secondart colors are orange, purple and green. Secondary colors are created by mixing two primart colors. Complimentary colors have no color in common. For example red and green are complimentary colors because red has no green in it and green has no red in it. Two ways you could emphasize something in a painting are by making it contrast with other parts of the painting and by makinig the size of it different from the rest of the painting.

A painting I remember

The idea of a background that strikes the eye harder than the focus is interesting and rarely explored. During my stay in New Jersey I visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where I was captured by a painting. It was not the focus or the detail or the colors that drew me to it.  Rather it was the background, specifically three giraffes running around chaotically, flames running up their spines. This fabulously surreal painting grasped me more than any other I saw that day, and opened my eyes to the world of Salvador Dalí.

My skills as an artist

My skills as an artist include creating original, unique ideas and expressing them artistically.  I am capable of using many mediums to express my ideas.  I love learning and I absorb new information about creating art.  I love sharing my ideas and am skilled at helping others understand as learn.  I open my mind to new ideas and spaces, allowing the painting to form itself, guiding my brush.  I do not let preconceptions and prejudices disturb my rhythm and flow.  I paint where the painting calls for paint let it emerge into its true form. 

Why I'm taking oil painting

I signed up for this course in order to learn more and gain more experience in painting and, ultimately, to paint.  I'm taking this course to have beautiful conversations with people who share my love for the arts.  To build my knowledge and understanding of what art is and how we, as people, can tap into it and allow wondrous paintings to flow through our fingertips.  I love art and intend to manifest my love in my paintings.