It’s taken me a couple weeks to start my research journal up again since starting uni, but we are now… officially back in business!
I’ve mainly spent my first weeks back get accustomed to being in university again. Having access to studios has been such a blessing, it really brings life back to your art. I’m definitely still getting used to balancing my art and philosophy studies though. It’s a pretty intense course, but it feels invigorating to push myself to succeed. This semester, we are allowed to submit an art piece as our Philosophy assignment, which could allow me to have a more coherent workflow. I will discuss what I am considering in my next post.
So far, I’ve mainly been working on a commission piece. This is my first time doing this, so it’s pretty exciting! The painting was commissioned by a family friend with whom I was on holiday in Brittany for a few days this Summer. They asked me to paint the beach which was nearest to where we were staying, so I actually have a first hand experience of the scene. They’ve given me creative control of the piece, which I found very flattering. The emphasis, however, should be on the light. This is great as it allows me to have enough of a directive to keep myself on track, but also use this as an opportunity to further explore my use of paint. And I feel like I’ve done a good job at that, further experimenting witj both transparency and impasto.
I started off with a tonal layer. I knew I would be using a lot of blues, so in order to balance them out I went with a warm sepia.
I moved onto adding colour, making sure to work with transparency so that the base layer would peak through. I then used thicker layers of paint to convey the structure of the rocks. Im trying to push myself to work more in impasto, as I have a bad tendency to be too frugal with the paint I use. This has been quite freeing as it offers me a wider “vocabulary” to use in painting. In the piece, it creates a nice contrast with the water and sand, which I wish to appear a lot softer.
In terms of light and colour, I’ve been looking at the work of Sorolla. His ability to convey specific times of day absolutely fills me with awe.
Next, I need to bring this structure to the foreground and emphasise it to create depth. I also need to add more thin layers to the water to make it more luminous. and add some more interesting colours. Afterwards, I will add more colour to the cliffs, add more layers to the sky and work on bridging the gap between the softer and more striking parts of the painting. I also wish to add people to the painting to make it more personal.
Bibliography
National Gallery, Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light (London: National Gallery Company Limited, 2019).