While my Blue Streak was drying, I painted another streak, this time it was vermilion. Again, I painted a white wash before I applied the color; again, the overlying coat of color went on very smoothly. I overpainted the vermilion red form with a coarse wash of red iron oxide. The transparent nature of this […]
I love to peruse the magazine section when I go to a bookstore. I gravitate toward the watercolor magazines and buy one now and then. However, I find that I rarely read them once I get home. Just as “writer’s block” is a phenomenon that inhibits writing, I’m sure that there is an equivalent circumstance that […]
I’ve been reading about some of the great abstract painters. Willem de Kooning is known for works such as Woman I and Excavation, which I have not seen in person. I am keen to learn more about him since my interest was stimulated by reading Eric Kandel’s book Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the […]
I used the atmospheric approach of yesterday with some bold outlines, in today’s watercolor. The amorphous areas are thus bounded by structure. The edges of the paper bound an awkward space. Three bright areas are mostly enveloped by the heavy greenish outline, but the other two yellow spots are only partially enclosed. I usually do not intentionally […]
I used some of the same techniques in the composition below, that I used in the Emerging Landscape study a couple of days ago. The transparent iron oxide pigments (yellow and red, in this case) combines the earthiness of the opaque earth tones with transparency of a glaze. The yellow transparent iron oxide makes an nice filter for […]
I began today’s watercolor by stomping my 1″ hake brush all around my dry watercolor paper. But first I loaded it with transparent red iron, an earth tone. I liked the splashes, but some of their traces did not survive the subsequent steps in my design. After the blots dried, I glazed some areas with Prussian blue, a […]
I began today’s painting in much the same way as I began the others of the past few days: choosing pigments, wetting the paper, spreading them around and watching them interact. In my painting entitled Layers, I repeated the steps of soaking the paper, applying more pigments to selected areas of the paper and letting the entire composition dry. […]
This is the third painting with my ‘purple, blue, yellow’ palette. I did not apply too many layers of paint atop the initial brush strokes in this composition. I liked the original, underlying forms and did not want to obscure them. In addition to the yellow earth tone, quinacridone nickel, I used bismuth yellow, which is […]
I continue the exploration of merging earth tones (particularly quinacridone nickel) with blues and purples in today’s watercolor. With subsequent layers of glazes, and some lifting of pigments, I created a piece that is layered across the two dimensions of the paper, as well as in the third dimension. The third dimension is built up with microscopically thin […]
I’ve been reading quite a bit about Action Painting and Color Field Painting in relation to the mechanics of visual perception in the human brain. Eric Kandel’s book Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures tells this fascinating story. As I understand it, the concept underlying both Action Painting (as in the paintings […]
