I have to have references. I am so envious of people who can paint from imagination (like Margie--look at her characters on her blog!). But I don't seem to be able to paint from within my head--or at any rate, very badly.
Frequently, however, I decide the subject of what I want to feature and then go looking for things to assemble, and they can be in-person, photos from Google Images, whatever. Here is a painting I did as a final assignment.The semester-long assignment from the watercolor class I was taking (from Carol Bishop at Los Angeles Valley College, a great teacher and mentor!) was to choose an object (mine was a blue teapot) and paint it every single week for an entire semester, looking at other artists' work and taking something from them to express in your rendition of the object: color palette, brush technique, theme, whatever. And the final assignment was to take everything you had learned and do a painting in your own style.
I soon got really bored with painting the damn teapot, so I kept trying to think of creative ways to use it. It featured in various paintings as an animated character, the moon, a teensy prop in the background, a wallpaper design...somewhere the teapot was there, but rarely the main event after the second or third assignment.
This painting included a back view of one of my "yard" cats from a window that I sketched really quickly one day, the blue teapot (from my kitchen), a mouse I found from a rodents and marsupials book in the library, trees/forest ditto from a botany book, and I also looked on the internet for a photo of Cinderella's carriage and the glass slipper to get good references from which to paint. I assembled them all, and figured out how to put them into perspective with each other, then combined them into this one picture. It's a plodding way to work, but my imagination seems to be limited to ideas ABOUT the painting rather than the visualization of the actual contents. It's called "Bereft of Cinderella."
One rather embarrassing comment I received: Someone viewed this painting in a small show, and said she thought it was so clever of me to choose to paint the slipper as a peau de soie rather than the traditional glass slipper. I had to admit that I simply didn't have the skill to achieve the effect of glass when I painted this!
ReplyDelete