With the thermometer over 50 degrees and the snow rapidly melting, Jeanette and I headed over to the nearby town of Rhinecliff today to paint a streetscape. In Rhinecliff, everyone gets their mail at the Post Office, so a lot of people walked by with their little kids, and you could hear the faraway sounds of hammers and radial saws.
Here's the pochade box, with what's left of the colors: ultra blue, white, naples yellow, cadmium yellow light, burnt sienna, burnt umber, and Winsor red. Because the whole scene consisted mainly of warm and cool greys, I premixed a warm string and cool string in the center of the mixing surface and worked mostly from those colors.
8 comments:
were the people inside the house creeped out that you set up camp right infront of there house and stared at it for a few hours...HAHA!
that is unless you gave the painting to them...in that case you can set up in front of my house anytime...haha.
Dear James Gurney,
This isn't relevant to your topic, I apologize. I wanted to ask: in Journey to Chandara, you have a picture of a feather -- a blackish feather with many white spots. I found the same feather years ago in a park here in British Columbia and have never been able to identify it. Do you know what bird it comes from?
Thank you,
Amy
Lovely streetscape. I like the way you paint things-as-they-are and include phone lines and road signs. I know your 90 degree rule helps you paint scenes that normally would not get a second look. Painting them encourages and rewards that second look.
I've often wondered if people would want to buy paintings like the one you did today in Rhinecliff. If someone like you showed up at my door offering to do an hour's oil sketch of my house for, gee, I don't know, $250, I doubt I'd turn him down. A painter's busking. Do people do that?
OK, a few answers:
Gator, actually it turned out that by chance I knew the guy who lived in the house I was painting. He came out and shot the breeze with us for a while.
Amy, I wonder if you found a feather of a guinea fowl. That's the one I've got on the last page of JTC.
And Dan, believe it or not, when I was traveling across country as an art student, I got turned down by about five homeowners in a row for the proposal of a $10.00 sketch of their house. Go figure.
Wow, this is lovely . . . and I love the limited palette.
Well, I would probably turn down an art student's offer for a $10 pencil or charcoal sketch. But a more lasting oil painting at a (much) higher price would be a much harder offer to decline.
I could be wrong on this, otherwise the enterprise I'm describing would be what was meant by the phrase, "canvass the neighborhood."
Okay, thanks. Some person must have dropped the feather, I guess. Either that or a guinea fowl was very, very lost!
I love this painting.
Post a Comment