Updates from Terri on Her Art Journey
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Last week I began a six-week watercolor course (on Zoom, of course) with Joan Iaconetti. Joan actually got me started on my art journey more than four years ago when I had my first lesson in watercolor with her at the Penn Club in Manhattan. Soon after that, I began calling myself a “visual artist.”
Little did I know then how little I knew about how to paint! Over the years, I’ve learned a bit more and picked up a few skills. But it’s always a good idea to refresh and get back to basics. So, I decided to re-take Joan’s watercolor class for beginners. Btw, Joan also teaches in-person classes at her studio in Union Square, as well as online. And she offers more advanced classes in painting various subjects, including flowers, pet portraits, landscapes, etc. If you want to learn more, check out her website at www.watercolor.joanweb.com One of the first and most basic lessons is HOW TO MIX COLORS. And you don’t need a lot of colors to mix literally hundreds of colors. You’ll see in this color chart I produced as an assignment, I used just six colors: two yellows, two reds, and two blues. I used a warm and a cool color of each of them. (Perhaps I’ll explain the difference between warm and cool colors another time.) YELLOWS: Lemon (cool) and Indian (warm) REDS: Vermillion (warm) and Permanent Rose (cool) BLUES: Prussian (warm) and Ultramarine (cool) With these six colors, I was able to produce an additional 15 colors, for a total of 21 different colors. And that’s not including all the many iterations of tints that can be made from these combinations by just adding a little water! All of these colors are lovely, but I’m especially drawn to YELLOW and even to some greens. So, I’ve asked myself why, and Joan provided an interesting theory taken from “The Psychology Behind People’s Favorite Colors” by David Lincoln Brooks: “Art teacher and famed color theorist Josef Albers once conducted an experiment with his students. He first asked them to paint a canvas with swatches of their favorite colors. Then he hung the results on the walls accompanied by a photograph of each student. An interesting pattern soon became apparent: people most liked the colors of THEIR OWN BODIES. Blue-eyed people were smitten with shades of blue; blondes taken with yellow hues; redheads were fascinated by various russet shades; dark-skinned people with browns and olives. (Though this doesn’t quite explain why many people like purple best.)” For whatever reason, we appear to prefer and feel comfortable surrounded by the colors of our own bodies. No wonder then, that as a green-eyed blonde, my favorite colors are YELLOW and GREEN. And now I understand why I love sunshine and I painted by bedroom walls a bright, sunny yellow. What’s YOUR favorite color?
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My fascination with trees started in childhood. One of my earliest memories is hearing the summer breeze rustling the leaves of the big oak tree in my grandparents’ backyard. Then there were the evergreen trees in their front yard under which I would set up my chalkboard early in the morning to teach neighborhood kids their ABCs. And the beautiful olive tree in the front lawn of my childhood home provided shade for my first enterprise, a candy and lemonade stand.
Fond memories, indeed. But only recently have I come to appreciate that trees and nature, led by the Holy Spirit, are the inspiration for my current artwork. Nature was also Vincent Van Gogh’s inspiration, and he made some gorgeous paintings of trees. For example, on my recent visit to the Met in Manhattan, I had the pleasure of admiring these paintings (and the guards let me photograph them): “Cypresses,” “The Flowering Orchard,” “Wheat Field With Cypresses,” “Women Picking Olives,” and “Olive Trees.” All of these were painted on 1889, a year before his tragic death. VINCENT ON NATURE Here are some of my favorite quotes by Vincent. I believe most of them were taken from letters to his brother, Theo. “Sometimes I long to paint landscapes, just as I crave a walk to refresh myself, and in all of nature, in trees for instance, I see expression and soul.” “The duty of the painter is to study nature in depth and to use all his intelligence to put his feelings into his work so that it becomes comprehensible to others.” “It isn’t the language of painters one ought to listen to but THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE.” “If I felt no love for nature and my work, then I would be unhappy.” I really look forward to meeting Vincent in heaven, and to thank him and God for guiding and directing me on my art journey. While I still have much to learn about technique and fundamentals of painting, when it comes to subject matter there’s an abundance in nature! ADVICE FROM A TREE My friend George Wilson recently posted a photograph of a tree with this clever message, “Advice From a Tree”:
Last weekend I had the great pleasure of visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is just across Central Park from my Manhattan apartment, where I lived for nearly 30 years before my husband and I moved to Las Vegas. My son says that now that we’re selling our apartment, I’ve become “just a tourist.” I guess he’s right, because now I actually have time to visit art museums!
Although I’ve been to the Met numerous times during the four decades I resided in the city, my visit last week was especially rewarding now that I’m on a personal art journey. Not only did I get a selfie with a portrait of my favorite artist (Vincent Van Gogh, of course), but I also was able to observe the works of several artists who painted “historical landscapes” and paved the way for the innovations of Impressionism. I was intrigued particularly with Gallery 805: SKETCHING FROM NATURE. Here’s a bit of what I learned: “Above all do as much as you can from nature: nature is first among masters,” advised the great eighteenth-century French landscape painter Joseph Vernet. The pictures in Gallery 805 reflect the practice of painting out of doors (aka plein air), which gained in popularity in the years around 1800. Artists would carry their portable easels and paint boxes into nature to capture their impressions of a particular site. Typically, they used small-scale sheets of paper as a support, sketching quickly in order to keep pace with fleeting atmospheric effects. The majority of these sketches were intended as studies—informal but purposeful exercises to train the eye and hand. They may have been admired by fellow artists but were not intended to be exhibited as finished works of art. Instead, their naturalism would become a sought-after element of more formal paintings the artists produced subsequently, in their studios. From the 1820s onward, appreciation of oil sketches spread among a small but growing number of collectors who prized their qualities of spontaneity and immediacy. Nearly half a century would elapse before the Impressionists embraced these characteristics in ambitious, full-scale paintings. Recently I’ve discovered I have a passion for painting TREES. So my attention was really drawn to the landscapes that featured trees, woods and forests. Believe me, there are LOTS of wonderful tree paintings by some amazing artists. Among my favorites on exhibit at the Met, many were French, including (chronologically) Pierre Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819), Simon Denis (1755-1813), Jean Victor Bertin (1767-1842), Francois Edouard Picot (1786-1868), Achille-Etna Michallon (1796-1822), Camille Corot (1796-1875), Theodore Caruelle d’Aligny (1798-1871), Auguste-Xavier Leprince (1799-1826), Theodore Rousseau (1812-1867), and last but certainly not least, Claude Monet (1840-1926). My favorite artist, Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), was not French. He was Dutch. But he, too, painted trees. In the year before he died, he made some of his most lovely paintings of trees, including “Cypresses,” “The Flowering Orchard,” “Wheat Field with Cypresses,” “Women Picking Olives,” and “Olive Trees.” All of these lovely paintings are on display at the Met. I'll share some of these with you in a future blog post. If you get a chance, check out the wonderful artwork at the Met. And if you need a tour guide, perhaps I’ll join you if I’m still in town. Like most artists, I want to find my unique, original, authentic voice. But I struggle. Most of the time, I feel like an imposter. If you can relate to my dilemma, give me an “Amen!”
One of the things I’ve been learning as I go through Louise Fletcher’s “Find Your Joy” course is that most artists copy or borrow ideas from other artists. In a lesson she calls “Steal Like An Artist,” we are asked to identify a painting we admire and without copying, create a painting that includes one or two elements we like, such as use of color, brushstrokes or subject matter. In another important lesson, she teaches about the power of contrasts. Simply put, it’s about choosing two things that are different from one another and using them in the same painting. Some examples are bold colors and subtle greys; realism and abstract; drawing and painting; warm colors and cool colors. Two artists I truly admire are Vincent Van Gogh and Salvador Dali, even though they are completely different. I love Vincent’s sunflowers and how he uses a limited palette, especially yellow ochre. And the way Dali combines landscapes and still lifes fascinates me. In terms of contrasts, I like the combination of smooth and textured brushstrokes; the use of paint and drawn lines; watercolor and acrylics together. So, for the paintings pictured here, I “stole” Dali’s idea by combining a seascape and a still life (in this case, Vincent’s sunflowers). For further contrast, I drew the flowers and painted the seascape; I used watercolors to paint a smooth sky and a palette knife to paint a textured sea in acrylics. These are not masterpieces, of course, but experimenting like this is helping me to see what I like and what I don’t like. And perhaps I’m getting closer to discovering my own voice. My plan had been to start the month of August with a Painting-A-Day event that would feature me painting a New England scene each and every day for the entire month. But, as Woody Allen once quipped, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.”
Needless to say, my plan has been disrupted. It all began when we got to our home in Connecticut and discovered that our modem had been fried by a lightning strike, which meant that both our phone and internet services were knocked out. Can you believe that at least ten of our devices depend on an internet connection?!? We lost the ability to communicate for nearly a week before service could be restored. I HAD planned to finish an online painting course I was taking . . . so that was the first plan deferred. Then we realized that the brakes on our Jeep were shot and had to be replaced. So that delayed my plan to go shopping for the materials I’ll need to start my paint-a-day event. Some things have gone well this past week. We got to see family and friends in the City. And my Manhattan apartment got beautifully staged and is currently listed for sale. Those were things I’d been praying about, and God has graciously answered my prayers. I believe the Lord has given me a different timeframe for my Painting-A-Day event, which I will now schedule for the month of September. Of course, I will be praying about that, and if you’re a believer like me, I hope you’ll be praying for me, too! |
AuthorTerri Thompson is a journalist-turned-visual artist, who is on an "art journey" and exploring how to tell her stories through her watercolor and acrylic paintings and photographs. Categories |