City Lit Fine Art Wk 9 - 3rd week of painting

This week I learned my lessons from last week, when I got my colours wrong by using bright yellow as a mid-tone, and when my approach was based on recreating the objects rather than thinking in more abstract terms of the objects as just shapes. And handling the oil paint takes a LOT of practice!

For instance, the method suggested is to draw in your dark tones first - which often means a lot of lines - but you're advised to do them with a thick brush - so your lines are not delicate and are way too thick. That's ok in itself - because you can paint your next tone up and over them. EXCEPT I find with oil paint you can't - which is why I had some horrid greens going on in last week's picture. So this week I decided to do my lines with a smaller brush - completely going against what Chris told me, but I didn't feel he provided me with a viable alternative to the problem I felt I was facing!

My original drawing that we were basing these upon was this:

and the point is to get all the ghost lines into your painted version too. This creates a more dynamic and interesting piece of work than just a painting which looks like the real thing it's supposed to be. In fact, Chris should have spelled out from the beginning that he was pushing us towards abstraction - something I only began to realise at the end of last week and felt a bit surprised by. It's fine 'cos I like abstraction, but it would have been nice to have known this overtly rather than having to discover that's what he was looking for.

He showed us three abstract expressionists today as well - Per Kirkeby, Fiona Rae, Grace Hartigan .

So my almost - finished-but-needs-something-more piece today is this:

It's still difficult for me to judge what's good / interesting / not working. The feedback from the class is interesting. And when you get no feedback, that's telling you something too! Chris barely spoke to me all morning, kept bypassing me. But he seemed to get more excited when I mucked around with the surface a bit more. I used my fingers and a palette knife too.