MobileMe Gallery - freshART 2009

MobileMe Gallery - freshART 2009

Tomato # 171

Cadmium Orange, Quinacridone Red, Prussian Blue and Titanium White.

This one took too much time. I started with Prussian Blue and Cad. Orange, which gave me an olive green, and the rest came so quickly- it was there and once again I tried to add just one more light and guess what...I ended up wiping it off and starting again-this time with purple- then it went to green and blue. I just kept going and this is the result. I set out to make orange the dominate color-so I did get there through a very circuitous route. At one time the shadow side was Prussian Blue-it took a while to bring it down. This tomato has a lot of paint on it. I am satisfied with the end result, but getting there took too long-these are intended to be color studies-not masterpieces.                                                  
                                               Fall down 7 times, get up 8- Chinese Proverb.
Painted September 10, 2010

Tomato #170

Cadmium Lemon, Quinacridone Red, Thalo Turquoise and Titanium White.

This is the last of this series-yellow is the focus. I seem to have an easier time with the yellow dominant tomatoes. This one took no time at all to paint. I started with a purple and moved to yellow. I like that you see the blue and red in this, but it is still yellow. Like # 169, this tomato is not as warm as I would like-leading me to the conclusion that this combination of colors tend to cool. It is contrary to convention that the red makes the shadow on the side of the tomato-you would expect the blue. The background is a combination of all three colors and white.

Painted September 9, 2010

Tomato #169

Cadmium Lemon, Quinacridone Red, Thalo Turquoise and Titanium White.

Lots of paint went onto this one. I started with a purple gray and then intense green, a few more strokes and I almost had it. Unfortunately, I had to tweak it a little more, which ended up taking way too much time. I don't think the foreground has quite enough heat or maybe the shadow is not cool enough. There isn't enough cool vrs. warm going on here-it is all cool. It's all about color relationships.

Painted September 8, 2010

Hamri Matisse

This is the first pig I painted for The Big Pig Gig in Cincinnati in 2000-he was positioned at City Hall-I miss him. He was sponsored by Amgen for the Barrett Cancer Center.

Tomato # 168

Cadmium Lemon, Quinacridone Red, Thalo Turquoise and Titanium White

This tomato started out shrieking bright green. Thalo Turquoise and Cadmium Lemon result in eye -popping, intense color; add Thalo Turq. and Q. Red and you get an intense purple. What I started with was high drama. I ended up with another soft and subtle tomato. Nice pink/coral lights and purple/coral shadows. The cast shadow is a much cooler purple. The background is a warm green made of all three colors-mostly yellow and white. I think the way the warm lights and cool shadows work are successful here- color harmony being the end result.

Painted September 7, 2010

Old Friends

I was going through some old art supplies to see if there was something that my daughter could use-she has a rather large list of art supplies for her AP Studio Art class. I have always been crazy about color. Every time I cruise through the school supplies or go to an art supply store, I have to restrain myself from buying just one more new box of anything with lots of colors. I'm a color-holic. Crisp new boxes of perfectly organized, perfectly sharpened crayons give me chills, so when I found this old box of pastels and realized what they were, I was a really happy camper. When I was around 10 years old we took one of our million mile trips -this one to New England. We stopped in Rockport Mass. and I remember being rather taken with it. We must have visited lots of galleries and an art store because I insisted on buying these with my own money. I know somewhere at my mom's are a few of the sketches I did with these-even though I had no idea how to use them.