Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Crisis in Venice

I took this photo of a gondola parking lot in Venice during my first ever trip to Europe in 1986. I chose to paint this because I thought that much of the painting would be large shapes without too much detail, and perhaps it could be completed reasonably quickly. Oh how wrong I was!

The photo is black and white, as are most of my photos from this period, and while I thought this would help me choose values, I realised that picking colours was going to be more difficult for me. The first thing I did was to scan around for a few photo references of Venice in order to get the colour scheme correct.

I chose to paint in Artisan Water Soluble Oils, and started by blocking in the larger shapes in approximately the colours and values I wanted. I thought this might help me achieve the colour and value judgements I needed to make as the painting progressed. In retrospect I think that painting in the windows was a mistake and should have been left until later.

Then I wanted to paint the evenly graded blue water - you know like one of those graded washes that every watercolour book teaches you how to do in lesson one, except it's never as easy as it seems. Well I have to say that in oil it just didn't work. I was painting with the oil undiluted, it was thick and did not spread well on the canvas. I achieved a gradation of sorts, as you can see, but it was nowhere near the even grade that I needed. I also started trying to correct the colour of the main building.

Having failed to achieve a graded colour with thick oil paints, I chose to paint over with several coats of a diluted pale blue (Artisan thinner) and then then build up the grade with several "glazes" of a thinned darker blue, or paler blue as necessary. At this stage I was starting to lose some of my important shapes but for the moment I was willing to accept that in order to learn how to achieve this wash.

Just back from art class. This is the result. My paint has had different ideas from mine. This is now a crisis. A disaster. This painting has beaten me. Simple shapes does not equal easy. I have a new-found respect for Mondrian.

Remember me talking about white paint? I think I'll start this painting again - in watercolour.

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