workings and Pierre Albert Marquet

more work. (sorry this photo is taken in natural lighting and it's pretty cold looking.

p.s

have a look at one of my all time favourite paintings by Pierre Albert Marquet (1875-1947)

I would love to see this painting everyday of my life...it is so full of life and a very quiet but defiant look in her eye.

In the next few posts I might show you a few painting oddities that I have pinned up on my wall.

Painting and Hans Heyson

I've been working on two paintings at the moment...my most recent painting of mum and another night-time portrait of her. The good news is that both are coming along well! There was a little bit of.... is it this blue ? or that blue? or this blue and that one? and then some more mixing and running back and forth looking at my canvas from a distance. Sometimes there's that elusive colour combination of nice in-between colours. (the answer was a tiny dab of Permanent Alizrian Crimson by the way!)


Every time I start a painting, I wish it to be more of a challenge than the last...I'd like to find some really complex compositions that are in right now and to somehow make the painting flow well and draw the viewer in. I've tried to crop my paintings further back from the main subject recently and it has helped because it really shows up the dead spots in some of my compositions.

There's so many little bits of social commentary I'd like to somehow work into my work and definitely think there will be more interior works and the canvases will be much bigger.

I went to see the Hans Heyson Exhibition at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

I was really excited when The Mercury featured a large free lift-out of a beautiful painting of majestic old gum trees. What expert composition!!!!!

I study it before I go to bed each night and rescue it off the floor when the blue-tack runs dry and peels off the wall. It's funny though because one of his large canvas just really sucked. It was really dull and just didn't work on a large scale at all. And there was a few vapid little drawings of Venice that Hans had painted while he was young.

Mum and I joined a tour-guided group while we were at the exhibition. It was interesting to beginning, but we made a dash after a while as I got the feeling the lady was reading imaginary cue-cards off the walls, rather than actually knowing or understanding about the artist.


A great oddity in the Heyson collection was a painting of 'the artists wife sewing' (1913) sitting at a desk under an open window....the light was luminous! it didn't really fit in with his the muted palette of most of the exhibition, but gee...what a great painting!


Anyway the heat has finally broken this evening (28 degrees) and now the rain is sounding off in a nice high pitched way when drops hit the roof....that's one of the great thing about Australia...tin roof music!

will update soon with work-in-progress shots.

more.

going back to basics.

I worked on this painting at class last Thursday...was so glad Steve got me to completely look at the dark and the lights again....i had missed it altogether..
I jumped ahead too quickly with my painting without getting the darks and the lights blocked in....definitely an interesting lesson.

instantly the painting had more weight to it..less detail but more life!


still umming and ahhing about what to do about the placement of that mat. I had some comments about the composition, so i will have a look in my art books again and look and examine and think about it some more.

all i had imagined for this painting was lots of warm earthy colours lots of orange and umber!

Allison Lowe.

have to work out the night painting...just have to get mum and the weather lined up first.

New portrait started

I started a new painting last night and worked as fast as I could to get as much information as I could in before the sitting was over. I am quite happy with colour and composition for the moment....although the more I research composition the more my mind wonders about how to lay out a painting...in the end I swapped the direction of the chair. I scrapped all my thumbnail sketches as they worked in theory but detracted from the overall feeling of the painting.

My aim in this portrait is to have rich warm tones and light and to offset these colours with some more light driftwood greys,blues and sage.




This is a portrait of my dad that i haven't finished...i wasn't happy with the layout...boring.

So i hope to add my mum into this painting as well and create a more intriguing composition. I just aimed for subtle neutral tones in this painting....to reallllllly show out that red skin tone and strange colour hair that dad has.

p.s I really like living near the sea...i love walking around the beach and even the estuary. There's so many birds around here!!! such a delight to see

I may just end up turning our house into a massive pile of driftwood collected from the beach.


Allison

night time painting.

just more workings on this piece.

i'm not going to rush this painting, because it's exciting for me..the idea at hinting at the figure in the night...the idea of subtle tones and light sources from varying angles. I might just get out plein air and continue it and put a light in the house that i can adjust etc.

i hope i can have more paintings where I have no idea if the thing is going to be a disaster. quite happy now.


almost offsets the stress of christmas.

River Painting- Finished.

I finally finished the river painting, I'm quite happy with how it is now.

Allison.

My Love Of Jean-Edouard Vuillard and Felix Vallotton

I am constantly in awe of these painters.

but there is one painting by another painter that really surprised me.. The painting is called "the floor scrapers" and it was painted by Gustav Caillebotte in 1875.

which to me seems insane, as most of Gustav Caillebottes other paintings are insipid and dead. How could he have created such a wonderful painting? In 1876 he completed another work called "The floor scrapers" with a different composition of the same subject and it was a flop.

His male nudes (Looking much like Degas) are just OK, but even they seem a little ridiculous! Male nudes drying off with a white towel just looks wrong.

"The house painters", painted by Caillebotte in 1877 is another of his best works.

Why did no one think to tell him he should continue with these themes instead of painting a man walking his dog ???

Paris Street, Rainy Day-1877 reminds me a lot of John Bracks-- Collins Street 5pm 1955 although Bracks version sure gets stuck into the yellow Ochre a lot more. (obviously the feeling is more intensified in the Brack painting)

this was actually meant to be a post about Vulliard and Vallotton,but I guess that's just be general gushing anyway.

so it failed....so what

yes, my outdoor painting session was a huge disaster.


I shot myself in the foot by starting with a bad composition...the work was so bad i destroyed it. I don't usually do that...but it was a dead painting anyway. I painted a rock formation and cropped it too closely and it looked horrible. The worse thing was I spent all day painting it even though i knew it was doomed.

however I am close to finishing the river painting...end of this week I will be done for sure.

I'm off to paint outside!

I went down to the ocean and made my way around the cliffs to make a little skietch on a small canvas board...well that was the other day and now I'm going back to see if my spot still looks amazing in midday sun as it does at 8:00pm Tasmanian time (dusk)
the spot is obviously quite steep so i'll have to be really careful as I still dont have my paintbox easel...just a tabletop easel!

I'm going to take a camera just to get shots of the process but I don't want to work on this pinting back in the studio..I just want to try and get something right away.

I'll post my painting this afternoon if I can....even if it doesnt't work out so well..


Allison