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.