River's Turn is genuinely beautiful — and I've named the problem exactly right. Pretty has a gravity all its own. When the color relationships are this harmonious — warm salmon ground, cool blue water echoing the trunks, pink trees distributed like punctuation across the middle distance — the painting becomes self-protective. It won't let you break it. Every mark that might introduce tension feels like vandalism against something already working aesthetically.
The result is a painting that explains its season, its light, its mood — completely and pleasantly. The viewer receives it rather than experiences it. The pendulum landed hard on explanation.
These 30 x 30 canvases are examples of what we will do on the first day of the workshop. We will throw an emulsion and rubber tipped tool into a nice sub-text for our pieces.
This is where I started today. My eye goes directly to the center of the cascade and completley bipasses the foreground. With the addition of the smaller stones, see how we work our way to the middle of the cascade instead.
In the first image the water is a highway — the eye gets on and drives straight to the middle, no stops. The foreground ledge plane is just a ramp delivering you there.
In the second, the added stone shapes break the flow into intervals. The cascade now has rhythm rather than speed — pauses, redirections, a sense that the water is negotiating its way down rather than simply falling. The eye has reasons to linger.
This is the end of the first coat of the future planned Hanging Rock painting. Three big shapes dividing the canvas into exciting top heavy structure. This will allow me to add huge amounts of chaos into the foreground.
I have to make a second layer of color closer to this study. The shore line bulges out a bit too and in my fist pass in recedes.
Below is reflects the first day of the abstract floral workshop. It is always nice to start on a messed-up surface. A pristine page stifles the creativity of feeling
This green is a mixture of sap green, cad yellow med, and ultramarine blue, along with a pinch of cad lemon, No white.
This is only one of the two canvases we will work on in this workshop. The other will start more traditionally with structure and drawing. But to quote Michael Tyson “everyone has a plan until they get hit in the face”
This is one of the pieces as an example. It serves many purposes for us:
1—subtext or underwear
2—plant leaf color
3—just enought mark making with R-T Tool to start to establish a rhythm of stems, leaves, pods, and blossoms, sort of a floral chaos