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.