Sunday, December 14, 2008

Art and Influence

A bountiful new art blog called "Art and Influence," has just burst upon the scene. The blog is the work of Virginia plein-air painter Armand Cabrera and Diane Burket.

In less than a month since its inception, they have hit the ground running with dozens of posts on Armand's traditional painting instruction, mainly in oil landscapes. There is also a rich collection of biographical spotlights from art history, focusing on realist/impressionist painters of the 19th and 20th centuries, complete with quotes and bibliographies.

Many of these posts were adapted from material Armand and Diane created for the website Outdoor Painting.
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Art and Influence blog, link.
Armand Cabrera website, link.
Outdoor Painting website, link.
GJ post about painting with Armand earlier this year, link.

2 comments:

Andrew said...

That blog is a gold-mine of information! I've spent about 20 minutes on it just looking through the archives, and I'm happy to add yet another fine blog to my links.

Thanks for throwing this up here for all of us to find!

Now I have a question for you, James. I know you've posted before about your usual color palette, but have you ever tried the combination posted on Art Influence of a warm and cool version of each primary and titanium white? No secondaries, browns, or blacks on the palette, just those colors.

James Gurney said...

Drew, yes, once in a while I have to wean myself from color mixing habits, especially the reliance on browns. Working from warm and cool primaries (or just simple red-yellow-blue) really helps to do that. Working from primaries doesn't necessarily mean the final painting has to be more saturated or chromatic--in fact it's really satisfying to paint a subtle greyish painting with pure primaries.