Monday, February 23, 2015

Drawing into paint






































Here are some snapshots of a little bit of the work we've done in class so far. Most of the paintings displayed here were made while observing a model lit with strong, colorful light. A few of the paintings were made from black and white photographs. We have been using acrylic and oil paint and have also been working with large and small surfaces.

John challenged us to create a small painting with brushes that were too big. This forced us to make bigger and more general strokes to create the planes of the face. John also encouraged us to draw over our painting as we worked on them to reestablish the underlying architecture of the figure. You can see some of those results showing through beautifully in this series of images.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

Anders Zorn Palette


John showed the class a couple videos about Anders Zorn and John Singer Sargent. The Zorn video pointed out the type of limited color palette he used while making his oil paintings. His palette was mostly comprised of ivory black, yellow ochre, cadmium red and white. We implemented this in class and these are just a few of the color varieties we got. I will show the figure paintings everyone made in the next blog post. In the meantime, here are the links to the videos if anyone is interested.

Anders Zorn Sweden's Favorite Son - YouTube

The Daughters Of Edward Darley Boit By John Singer Sargent - YouTube

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Dave Dornan




John described a method his friend, Dave Dornan, uses to keep your eye moving through color placement. Dave will begin by starving the painting of color and work mostly in black and white. As he adds color, he triangulates the placement of primary colors to get your eye moving. I feel like the top image is a good example of this type color placement. His images aren't figure paintings, which is what we've been focusing on creating, but they are good reminders for color analysis. Keep in mind how much neutral and intense colors you want to exist in your image. The neutrals will always make your intense colors pop visually and hold the viewer's attention.

Mr. T doppelganger peels coconut with teeth


Andres Gardin is a coconut peeler in Panama has been peeling coconuts with his iron jaws since he was 11. He has peeled over 100,000 coconuts. Check out this article that was written about him and his attempt to get into the Guinness Book of World Records last year.
Andres Gardin, Panama Coconut Peeler, Attempts Guinness World Record - WITH HIS TEETH (VIDEO) 

John compares painters to athletes. If you paint, you are an athlete so that means you need to prepare and train like one. Invest in studio time like Andres peels coconuts.

Fist in a coconut



A couple weeks into class, John shared the well known 'monkey trap' story to help us understand how to let go of the things we've been taught which corrupt our vision and in turn inhibit our observation and painting skills. The story was also used to explain when to stop working on a painting before you destroy it - when to let go of the peanuts and pull your hand out of the coconut before you get the machete. This theme (letting go of old perceptions) appears again and again in John's descriptions of painting.