Thursday, January 22, 2015

Scraping to a Better Painting

After taking a short painting hiatus so that I could focus on making jewelry for a variety of holiday show, it feels good to get back to an easel. 
The more I paint, the more I appreciate that I don't know many of the fundamentals taught in art school.
Much of what I learned as I pursued degrees in landscape architecture and designed gardens and public spaces informs what happens on my canvases,
but there's so much that I need to/want to learn about color mixing, understanding shadows and developing atmosphere.
 
My current focus is painting to learn, and not necessarily painting to end up with a good painting.
Lucky me....I'm learning from Martin Campos 
Yesterday's still life had me struggling with the red cloth that covered the table and wrapped around the green bottle holding a lily stem.
My table was looking like an awkward red blob until Martin suggested that I mix some dark green for the deep shadows.
What a difference and what a good learning moment.
 
So.....
I had a good learning moment on a painting that I didn't consider a keeper.
While the paint was still wet, I decided to scrape it with a palette knife so that I could reuse the canvas.
 The more I scraped, the more I liked it.
Now I'm thinking that this is a painting that could go somewhere interesting.

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