Updates from Terri on Her Art Journey
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Last week, I finally completed my benchmark painting for 2024. It’s a 9” x 14” acrylic painting I call “‘Bridge Over Ridge Pond.” Taken from a reference photo, it’s a winter scene of the gazebo at Lakeridge, the community in western Connecticut where I spend a couple of months each year in late summer/early fall.
My benchmark paintings for 2023 and 2022 are also in acrylics and done from photos I took at Lakeridge. But they are both on smaller, 8” x 10” canvases. It’s at the suggestion of my painting instructor and mentor, Rod Moore, that I’ve made these benchmark paintings each year as a way to measure my progress. “To me it’s important that you make reasonable progress in reasonable time with your painting whilst having fun and enjoying the process,” says Rod. Rod says a benchmark painting is “designed to get you out of your comfort zone and to really test your current skill levels. This then gives a guide as to what you need to focus on: which skills you need to make improvements with to move your painting forward.” So, for this year’s benchmark, I went larger. I’ve always been a bit reluctant to paint on any canvas bigger than 8” x 10,” so I challenged myself to go to 9” x 14.’ Perhaps by next year I’ll be ready to go to 16” x 20” or even 20” x 26.” And I hope I’ll have plenty of reference photos from my trips to Italy and Turkey (planned for later this year, God willing) that will inspire me to paint a subject other than Lakeridge!
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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 |