Paintings of France, Italy and Beyond

Well there’s nothing like computer woes and an out of town trip to keep up the momentum for a painting demonstration! But at long last, here is the resolution to the  demo I started in late April:

When I last left off, I had my concept and composition well planned out, so now I set to work on finishing.  This involves painting in the foreground and punching up the highlights of the middle distance and background, where needed.

But something happens at this point. I kind of get too lost in the irises, making them too defined and pronounced. Soon I find my tunnel vision has gotten me so lost in the irises that they start to take over.

Argh! Attack of the irises! They’ve taken over and are rather too big and too saturated, creating more of a competition with the old abbey.  I’ve also lost the lower wall in the middle distance almost entirely, which I rather liked, as it helped to lead the eye further into the painting.

My solution? Basically I scraped down the entire lower portion of the painting! Eh,  it happens. The paint had become too thick to really rework, and sometimes it’s easier and less distracting to just scrape it off in order to open it back up. In this case I felt a ”do-over” was warrented.

“Irises at Abbaye Nouvelle”
Oil on Canvas, 40″x30″
Click here for more info!

Ahh…better. (At least I think so!) I’ve gotten my herb-covered wall back, and reworked the irises in the foreground so as to frame but not overpower. I’ve treated them a bit more impressionisitcally too,  to flow better with the rest of the painting. I also decided to tone down some of the greens and golds in the middle distance to make them “sit back” in the picture plane.

At this point I’ll conclude. If I touch it any more it will be only a tweak here and there. I’ve shot and reshot the final several times but we are getting such dark days lately with all this rain that I can’t seem to get the nuances in the colors quite right in the photo. This picture is close, but I’ll likely try another shot once the sun comes out.

Jennifer Young; Vibrant Landscapes
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This post continues a demo I started last week. To start from the beginning, click here!

Before going too much further I like to get a good feel for my area of interest, so I lay in the general colors and highlights of the wall of the Abbey ruins. I’ve worked wet into wet to blend the purple shadow colors with the warm local colors of the Abbey wall, which gives me a nice mixture of golds, browns and muted violets.

At this point I am ready to dig in to the rest of the landscape and get that canvas covered. To keep the flow going, I try not to be “stingy with my paint“. For this painting I’m using a somewhat more expanded palette than I do when I paint on location. 

I  want to have large enough puddles of the colors I see so that I don’t have stop every five seconds to mix up more paint. This process is pretty organic so it’s difficult to give a step by step process of mixing colors. In addition to blending paint wet-into-wet on the canvas, I also tend to dip into various larger puddles to make new blends as I go along. The most important thing during this process is just to compare one color, one value to the others, constantly asking myself, “Darker or lighter? Warmer or Cooler?”

I also decide to indicate the basic iris colors so that I know where I’m at. I have to be careful here–even the middle value of the purple/blue flowers has a lot of white in it, so  I really don’t want to paint these too thickly or it will be hard to control the darks, making them muddy and less pure. A lot of these preliminary iris lay-ins will need to be restated, and, of course defined, but I felt like I wanted some indication of them in there at this point so I wouldn’t get lost (if that makes any sense!)

Here you can see that I’ve continued on working my way down the canvas so that eventually everything is pretty well laid in. I’ve held off putting down much of my strongest highlights. That will be among my next steps, along with further refining, defining, tweaking, and adjusting.   

Up to this point I have used just a few brushes. Aside from the one round I used for the linear drawing of my composition in the earliest stages, I’ve used my larger flats and filberts. Being the very messy painter that I am, I can’t tell you the size numbers of any of these, as there is old smeared paint on all of my handles, completely obscuring any info that once was printed on them! I think probably  the smallest in use is around an 8 or 10(flat) but the ones I used the most were the largest filberts I have, with widths ranging from 1 and 1/4″ to 1 and 3/4″. I love these large filberts, as you get a nice thin edge at the tip and a broad flat side too, making them very versatile for my purposes. I could even stand to go to a larger size brush for this size painting, but I need to conserve my expenses so I’m trying to use what I have on hand right now.  Even so, if I use the broad side of the brushes I can get a pretty broad and loose stroke and avoid getting too fussy with too many details too early!

To be continued…

Jennifer Young; Vibrant Landscapes
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My lapse in posting has probably made it seem like I fell off the face of the Earth or something. In fact, I was in Texas last week (which actually did feel a bit like another world to me –just kidding Texans!) I had to slip away unexpectedly to assist my mom, who was just released from the hospital after major surgery.

The good news is that she’s been doing great, and I’m back home now and back to painting. It’s been far too windy and rainy this week to do any plein air work, so I’ve decided to continue my French landscape series with nice big 40×30″ linen canvas in the studio–a vertical painting of an ancient church in ruins among a field of irises.

I started with a monochromatic tonal wash in transparent red oxide:

While this is a representational painting, my approach to the work is in the abstract. My aim at this stage is to express the pattern of lights and darks in a fluid and interesting manner. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you might remember a plein air painting I did of this same site last summer. Even though this larger painting will be of a different view from that location, I will use my plein air painting and my experience from that work to inform this piece.

The finished painting will have a lot of irises in the foreground, but I don’t bother drawing them in at this point. My main concern early on is to connect my darks in such a way as to create an interesting underlying armature that will provide a structure for any detail, and also hopefully provide enough interest so as to lead the eye around the canvas.

Painting in this monochromatic, thin wash helps me to develop my overall composition without great commitment. Transparent red oxide is not a highly staining color, so if corrections or changes are desired, any marks I make at this stage can easily be wiped away with a paper towel dipped in solvent (I use Gamsol).

Incidental staining is not really a concern any way, since I usually like a toned canvas. It’s sort of like I’m making a grisaille painting and toning my canvas at once. In this instance, I decide to leave the lightest lights (in the sky) mostly completely white, as I will next use the white of the canvas to develop the shape of my clouds:

Basically I’m painting the negative space of the sky with the blue paint mixture. Working on linen is a real pleasure. It makes it really easy to use my paper towels to smudge and wipe away paint so as to refine shapes and create those soft, wispy edges.

After I established the basic cloud pattern, I start to add paint, color and shadow to the white of the clouds. I also begin to develop my darks, and give some definition to my area of interest; the ruins of the old abbey.

Further developments are under way and forthcoming soon….Stay tuned!

Jennifer Young; Vibrant Landscapes
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I haven’t written in a while about my return back to the exploration of the figure, but it has been going relatively well. The weekly class I’ve taken with Robert Liberace has been wonderful, but I must say that the 1.5 + hour commute (each way) has been a little bit of a challenge, and unfortunately I had to miss a class or two in the semester because my car broke down. (That’s one of the drawbacks of taking an out of town class–you can’t exactly catch a ride if your transportation source goes south!)So while I’ve felt a little bit disjointed with my schedule glitch, what I’ve also discovered is that my time in class flies by very quickly, and that my execution with drawing the figure from life is still relatively slow.

Rob did some amazing demonstrations during the course of each class, and I often felt torn about whether I should watch the demos for the duration or work on my own drawings. I tried to acheive a balance of the two as best I could, but since my time with Rob was rather limited (and I can hang out with myself most any time), watching Rob’s demos often won out. As a result I’ve ended up with rather a lot of “beginnings,” and nothing from this class really has the feeling of a finished work.

But that is the nature of  learning, I think. And whenever  I teach my own workshops I always try to emphasize to students that in a learning environment, the goal of finishing or making a “framable product” should be subordinate to learning and experiementation.

I took a decent amount of figure drawing in college, so I don’t consider myself to be a novice. But I’ll say without equivocation that this class was definitely experimental for me. In fact, since it’s been such a long time since I’ve done much if any life drawing, in hindsight I might have been slightly cavalier by signing up for this class. Rob has a lot of devoted followers and it became clear to me early on that many of his students (talented in their own right and some also teachers themselves) were quite familiar both with Rob’s teachings and with life drawing in general.

I probably would have done well to have first gained a level of comfort by taking an entire semester of a more basic class in just one or two drawing mediums– charcoal and chalk, for instance– to really develop my drawing.  The class was called something like “exploring the figure,” which is a hint that it was the next stage beyond just fundamentals. And while all along the way we learned about correct proportion and developing mass and form, there was a little more emphasis in this class on exploring different mediums from drawing to painting, which added a whole new level of learning to an already complicated subject.

But neither my car breakdowns nor my cavalier course selection was enough to detract from the class as a whole, thanks wholly to the instructor. I found Rob to be an incredibly energetic, enthusiastic, and helpful instructor. Most of all I found him to be so very inspirational. Beyond his masterful technical acuity, he displays an incredibly beautiful  sensitivity and true artistry in his work.  So in many ways,  I am glad to have taken this particular class; because not only did it enable me to see the range he is able to acheive in his own work, but I also could see hints and clues about what is possible for myself.

*Note, scattered throughout this post are a few of my studies from the class. All are pretty small–ranging from 4×6″ to 8×10″. The small gestural studies (short poses from 3 to 7 minutes) were done in sepia ink. The two subsequent pieces were watercolor, and the final piece was a grisaille on linen, done on the last day of class.

Jennifer Young; Vibrant Landscapes
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Recently I was interviewed by Creative Spotlite’s Ralph Serpe.  In the interview, I respond to Ralph’s questions about my journey as an artist and my art career thus far. Ralph is the founder of the Creative Spotlite art instruction website and blog, both of which feature an ever-growing collection of free art lessons, demos, links,  and a wealth of other resources for artists.

In conjunction with the interview, Ralph has also featured my plein air demo for my painting ”Vineyard Patterns” on his site. Thanks Ralph, for featuring me and my work, and for creating such content rich sites for artists!

Jennifer Young; Vibrant Landscapes
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