Finishing our 2-Week Painting Workshop

You all really "pushed" yourself to find a way through our project!! Well done.

I appreciate that we don't all work the same way or approach artmaking in the same 'direction', so to speak, so it was really fun working with all of you on your different ideas, and thanks for including mine.

I would like to leave you with the images below by Vincent Van Gogh, painted in 1890. Look for a background, middle-ground and foreground.  Can you identify three distinct regions(depths) to the artwork? Can you see more? Other than colour temperature ie; cool blue, cooler greens or warmer greeny yellows)- can you see other elements of composition or detail that help the painting describe a depth?  Can you find an element that makes the painting seem very flat as well (what about line quality or perhaps style?).  Think about the terms  push (where things come forward) and pull(where things go back) and how they can apply in painting and why that might be interesting.  Lastly, look at your own work again with the above in mind.

Wheat Fields after the Rain (The Plain of Auvers), July 1890,
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA (F781)

Wheat Field Behind Saint-Paul, November 1889,
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia (F722)

Tree trunks in the grass
[Boomstammen in het grass]
Collection: Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo    
via    http://nga.gov.au/exhibition/turnertomonet/Detail.cfm?IRN=165860

Background, Middleground, Foreground April 8th and 15th

We are well into our paintings for this 2 week workshop.  Lots of sharing and generating interesting artistic challenges for ourselves.

We are creating space in our paintings - thinking about how we create depth with warm and cool colours, and ways of talking about backgrounding and foregrounding as an idea in painting.  We looked briefly at this site for a quick description of what we are exploring in our paintings:

from bigblackpig.com

http://www.bigblackpig.com/painting/back-and-fore.html

And we discovered pure colours vs. shades as an element of contrast, creating unity through our palette of colours, perspective lines and collage elements used to create depth, and reworking our composition to convey the effect we wanted. 

We let go of middle ground for now, but will try to find it again in each of your works when we hang your paintings next week.  You all did a great job creating your own study in foregrounding with enthusiasm and skill. Looking forward to seeing your finished pieces.

A fun art link:  
http://www.getty.edu/education/teachers/student_resources/index.html

Thanks for a fun session!

To finish sharing this session I am including S.'s Robot - so determined!!

 And our great sign: how artists say "Thank-you!"

...and a random selection from sketchbooks:  (more to come)

zombie

 monkey friends

ArtClub Selfies

 

These are a great invention by D. and V.
They could become a chain

of friends, a classroom or collaborative group...
like Instagram in real paint:

This:

   

became this:

 

This is my example of random technique for inspiration.
I tend to resist projects led through another artist's style, including my own(!!), but we looked briefly at work by Warhol and Chuck Close for Art History permission to consider our photo-likeness in self-portrait.