WHITE BEACH, DALKEITH (1a)

Hi Jeremy
I really enjoyed your exhibition. It was inspirational for me. Hope it was successful

I am currently painting in acrylic on wc paper after allergy problem. Not sure it was caused by oil paints. Now that I am OK will probably try to use oils again sometime soon.

Using acrylic on paper seems to have provided a break through for me. Paintings are loose and colourful.

You may care to browse through my Painting Blog to see what I have been doing. Please look in here

I am painting 3-4 days week at least twice plein air, but aim to do some larger studio work as well.

The following painting, "White Beach" was completed in the studio following a plein air session. It is acrylic on wc paper apprx 9"x12"

I have been selling the odd painting here and there, just enough to pay Murray Gill for my art materials.

Have been framing acrylic on paper under glass. What is your view on this?

Cheers
Bob

Recent frames for my paintings by Leonardo (exChallen & Rafferty). Double mat size 3.5" wide(4"at bottom) and 2.5" frame width.

 

Hi Bob

I wrote this reply before I went to Lao cut but couldn't get it posted due to the problems I get with the internet.  Now I am posting I see that you have edited your original post to me so my reply is a bit out of synch.  Never mind I am sure you will understand what I am saying.

Jeremy

I haven’t come across ‘Wet canvas’ before.  I have joined and when I get back from my trip to Lao I will spend some more time looking at it, thanks.

Yes your acrylic painting looks bolder and has more tonal contrast than some of your other works.

The framing looks great.  It makes such a difference to paintings.  Yes definitely put the acrylic paintings under glass.  When I was preparing for my current exhibition I did some smaller paintings on canvas which I wasn’t going to frame.  I don’t normally put works on canvas under glass and I wasn’t going to frame these particular paintings as I was not 100% happy with them.  When Charles, my framer, saw them he told me I had to frame them as they were so good.  I wasn’t keen to spend any more money on framing having spent $6,000 already but he insisted even saying that he would give me a special cut price on the framing because it was so important.  So he framed it and to my surprise put it under glass.  It was the first painting to sell in the exhibition.

So sometimes even oil paintings on canvas look better under glass.  Generally I put any works on paper under glass although sometimes I frame well varnished works without glass. Glass is never a problem except on very large paintings where weight becomes an issue.  It’s not a good idea to dispense with the glass if the surface of the work (on paper) is vulnerable to physical damage or cannot be cleaned.  Acrylics on paper would be OK without glass provided that you have good coverage of the underlying paper so it’s just a question of what looks best.

Coming back to the painting of the tree.  It has some nice tonal contrasts and the colours are more interesting as you have departed from realism.  However, as we have discussed before, there are design weaknesses both in the composition and the colours.

This is very much a matter of taste but to me the area of river to the right it uninteresting and I would have cut it back more. If you crop it out with your hand so that the painting is in portrait format there is an immediate improvement.

For years I wrote on the top of my sketch books “Draw negative shapes” and I used to design a painting starting with a thumbnail sketch consisting of negative shapes.  If you can create interesting negative shapes the whole work tend to hang together better.

So here you have a strong positive shape formed by the tree a vertical rectangle to its left filled with some attractive pattern, large empty sky  and river shapes to the right, an interesting shape of trees filled with pattern immediately to the right of the tree and a couple of foreground rectangular shapes.

Incidentally, the white beach foreground shape is tending to jump forward on its left hand end due to a combination of the strong tonal contrast and the simplicity of the shape. It would recede better if you toned it down on the left or fingered it into the trees.

The most exciting of the shapes is the one in the middle which is also the natural focal point of the painting.  Here you have the potential for a lovely filigree effect as the middle ground trees are silhouetted against the distant shore.  I would darken those trees to enhance this effect and bring them further to the right to reduce the uninteresting area of river.

At the same time you have the opportunity to create a greater feeling of romance.  As you know with landscapes its always that feeling of that beautiful place beyond that is so powerful.  I know it’s cheating but I would make the distant shore closer and put a bit more pattern into it, widening the white beach.  Then I would open up the trees in the centre of the painting to allow glimpses of that distant beach.

It would also be good to extend the foreground beach to the left so that you can see it in areas behind the central trees.  This would both lead the eye into the painting and enhance that sense of an interesting distant view.

I would also consider putting a smudgy boat in on the river to create interest.

These are all possibilities and it would be instructive to go back into the painting to see if you can enhance it.  To move forward you need to be able to take the risk of creating your own reality, which I guess is part of an answer to your post script about wanting to move on.

A few words on the colours.  If you do a colour wheel sketch of the painting (which I do most of the time as part of the preliminary thumbnail sketch) you will see that the painting is in the area of the wheel ranging from green to violet and centred on blue. That’s great as these colours harmonise well, but there is a useful rule that says that you should work mainly in one area of the colour wheel but then enliven with some of the complimentary colour.  This is a long winded way of suggesting that you should put some orange colours in the work.

Jeremy.