My Barn Burned Down

Landscape a la Whistlers limited palette

Making art is such a great lesson in how to live life. On about.com:painting, the October project was to use a limited palette, mixing neutral grays and in the style of Whistler create a landscape, urban scene, whatever. It was an interesting project to work on because in the Legacy painting tutorials I am also working on mixing grayscales, color value charts, complementary value charts, etc. and so translating those skills into an actual painting, I thought, would be fun. Fun does not describe it. It got darker and darker and I couldn’t seem to mix the proper gradations of value to maintain some semblance of a scene that I could see in my mind, but was unable to translate to the canvas.  “Know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em” kept going through my mind until, AT LAST, the deadline came (today) and I had to force myself to fold ‘em on this one. But I did like the practice it gave me and plan to try again at some point. I learned that sometimes the simplest looking paintings are actually very difficult to execute! More importantly I am learning how many value jumps happen within a small space that translates through our eyes to our mind to discriminate ‘form’. I now understand why we must observe nature directly, not just photographs. So many gradations are lost in photographs.

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