Challenge: Paint a Parking Lot

Painting by Scott Lloyd Anderson

There's beauty everywhere, right? Well, how about in a parking lot?

That's the subject for the next GurneyJourney on-location painting challenge. We've done this before with gas stations, graveyards, weeds, and outdoor markets, and you've created stunning artwork.

Art in a parking lot

I invite you to paint some interesting aspect of a parking lot. You might paint a view across a lot, with or without cars. You could emphasize a light effect, an interesting sign, or a cluster of shopping carts, or a little bit of nature alongside the lot. It can be a New York vestpocket parking lot, an underground parking structure, or a suburban big-box lot.

(Link to video on Facebook)

How does the challenge work?

Everyone can upload their examples to this special Facebook event page. I will choose a Grand Prize winner and five Finalists. Each receive a coveted "Department of Art" embroidered patch, and the Grand Prize winner will also receive a free tutorial download.

I hesitate to call it a "contest" because there's no entry fee and the spirit is more about cooperation, community, and camaraderie than competition. We're all at different levels of skill and experience, but we're all out there braving the elements and trying out new painting ideas.

Painting by William Wray

Guidelines

• Must be painted outdoors, or at least mostly outdoors.
• The composition can include the scene beyond the parking lot, but the parking lot itself itself must be a part of the scene.
• You can focus on the ordinary aspects, the sublime aspects, the ugliness, or the beauty. Just make it  interesting. 

• All physical painting media accepted, such as oil, watercolor, acrylic, gouache, acryla-gouache, alkyd, casein, or water-soluble colored pencils.
• No limits on palette of colors.

Deadline
• You can enter as soon as you finish the piece, but no later than the deadline: Friday, July 27, 2018 at midnight New York time. Winners will be announced on Wednesday, August.

Bird's Foot Trefoil, donut wrapper, and plastic bottle
alongside supermarket parking lot

Submission Guidelines
• Free to enter
• It must be a new painting done for this challenge. In addition to a scan of the final painting, your entry must include a photo (or video) of your painting in progress in front of the motif.
• Upload the images to this Facebook Event Page. If you don't have a Facebook account, please ask a friend with an account to help you. Please include in the FB post a mention of what medium you used, and if you want, a word about your inspiration or design strategy, or an anecdote about your painting experience.

• In addition to the Facebook event page, you can use the hashtag #parkinglotchallenge on Instagram or Twitter to see what other people are doing.
• If you end up doing more than one entry, please delete your weaker entry so that we end up with just one entry per person.

Prizes
I'll pick one Grand Prize and five Finalists. All six entries will be published on GurneyJourney, and all six will receive an exclusive "Department of Art" embroidered patch. In addition, the Grand Prize winner receives a video (DVD or download) of their choice. Everybody who participates will have their work on the Facebook page, too.
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Check out the previous results for gas stations, graveyards, and outdoor markets.

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Church's Parthenon Sketches

An exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut features the on-location paintings that Frederic Church (1826-1900) did while traveling.

When Church ventured to the Old World in the late 1860s, he decided to visit Athens to paint the Parthenon, "the finest edifice on the finest site in the world."

His studies are on paperboard, with thin, deftly applied semi-transparent layers of oil over a careful pencil drawing, resulting in an almost photographic level of capture.

Church was experimenting with night painting in 1869, and his view of the Parthenon at night captures the contrasts between the reddish light outside the structure and the cooler light inside.

The main focus of his study was this view of the Parthenon, which presents the ancient monument as a noble ruin, surrounded by wild rubble. In fact, he would have had to screen out the bustling city of Athens that crowded many views of the site. 

The structure itself had been almost perfectly intact until 1687, when a Venetian mortar shell hit the building and touched off gunpowder that was being stored there by the Ottoman Turks.

Most of the original paintings in this post are currently on exhibit in the Wadsworth Atheneum show, along with Church's paintings (both sketches and big studio works) portraying Jerusalem, Petra, and other exotic places. The exhibit will be up through August 26.

There's a handsome oversize catalog "Frederic Church: A Painter's Pilgrimage" if you can't make it to the exhibition.

Book Review: Homer and the Camera

A new exhibition called ‘Winslow Homer and the Camera: Photography and the Art of Painting’ opens this Saturday at Bowdoin College in Maine.

The show and the associated catalog examine the longstanding engagement of Winslow Homer (1836-1910) with various aspects of photography: its purely visual effects, its usefulness as a picture-making tool, and its role in shaping the artist’s public image.

"Winslow Homer, Charles S. Homer, Sr., and Sam at Prout’s Neck,"
ca. 1884, albumen silver print, by Simon Towle. Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

I had always assumed that Homer was camera shy and there are few photos of him, but recent scholarship has turned up new discoveries, many of which are included in the exhibition.

Homer’s interest in photographs gained momentum during his time as a sketch artist covering the Civil War. He collected photographs that were taken by others, which helped him visualize the scenes he portrayed for the popular magazines.

By the 1880s, he sought fresh inspiration for his artwork, so he traveled to Europe, and he bought the first of three cameras.

Though he never wrote about his use of photographs as reference, the authors explore the various ways his art was shaped by the camera, a tool that could simultaneously capture accurate information and deceive the viewer.

His painting of a fish in mid-leap was his painterly response to the ability of the camera to freeze action. Though probably not based directly on a photo, the very idea of painting a moment from fast action was unusual in the nineteenth century, when most other artists would have painted a fish as a still life object.

The exhibition and book contain other insights into Homer's process, including doll-size mannikins with simple costumes, which he used for reference when drawing and painting working-class women.



The exhibit ‘Winslow Homer and the Camera: Photography and the Art of Painting’ is the product of years of study by Bowdoin art historian Dana E. Byrd and museum co-director Frank H. Goodyear III. Bowdoin College hosts the first showing of the exhibition, which travels in November 2018 to the Brandywine River Museum.

The catalog is 208 pages with 138 color illustrations, hardbound, and published by the Yale University Press. The exhibition will be up from June 23 - October 28, 2018.
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Other books that explore the relationship between painting and photography:

Art and Photography by Aaron Scharf, 1968. Covers the influence of photography on portraiture, landscape, realism, and impressionism.

Shared Intelligence: American Painting and the Photograph, Edited by Barbara Buhler Lynes, 2011. Chapters on Eakins, Remington, Steiglitz, O'Keeffe, and Bechtle. In this book the main emphasis is on modern painters.

Painting and Photography, 1839-1914. by Dominique de Font-Réaulx, 2012. Textbook-style coverage of the intersection between realist painters and the photographic image, with chapters on genre photography, photographing the nude, portraiture, and painters who were also photographers.

The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso. Oversize book with features on key artists who used photography.

Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera. Shows Rockwell's reference photos compared to his finished illustrations, as well as information about how he took photos and how he changed them to suit his purposes.

Previously on GurneyJourney
Using Photo Reference

Waterfall City demo

Here's the demo painting of Waterfall City, painted while looking at a rough maquette. 

I did the painting for a workshop audience at IMC (Illustration Master Class) in Amherst last week. (Link to video on Facebook)

Photo: Irene Gallo

Total time: 1.5 hours.
Camera: Canon M6 camera positioned on second tripod.
Medium: Casein over a green-gray casein underpainting in a Pentalic sketchbook.
Colors: White, light red, yellow ochre, ultramarine blue.
Final glaze: Payne's gray watercolor with acrylic medium.
Varnish: Acrylic spray Crystal clear.

Art Talk Podcast: Studio Ramble to Ron

The Golden Palm Tape Network was a 1980s precursor of podcasting, where a small group of far-flung artists kept in touch by recording circulating ideas and readings via tape cassettes. (Video link) 

This one is addressed to my friend Ron Harris of southern California, a comic artist, collector, and art historian who still comments on this blog.

Sandor Bihari -- Before the Judge

Listening to the tape is a reminder to me of how it was in the 1980s. Discovering obscure information required sleuth work at libraries and used bookstores, plus the cooperation of friends with similar interests. 

The primary members of Golden Palm Tape Network were: 

Ron Harris 

Paul Chadwick 

Tom Kinkade 

Bryn Barnard 

James Warhola 

Here are links to some of the books and artists referenced.

Books (links mostly go to Amazon)

Some Call It Kitsch: Masterpieces of Bourgeois Realism 

Genre Painting in the Hungarian National Gallery by Supka 

American Boys' Handy Book 

Joaquín Sorolla

Edwin Austin Abbey by E. Lucas 

Pen Drawing and Pen Draughtsmen by Joseph Pennell 

Rendering in Pen and Ink by Arthur Guptill 

Mastering the Craft of Painting by Angelo John Grado 

The History of Modern Painting by Richard Müther 

The Ulysses Voyage by Tim Severin 

Mural Painting in America by Edwin Blashfield 

William Bouguereau, 1825-1905 (Exhibition Catalog) 

The Life and Work of Jean Léon Gérôme by Gerald Ackerman 

Artists Mentioned (links mostly go to Wikipedia)

Heinrich Siemiradzki 

Simon Hollósy 

Sandor Bihari 

Mihály Munkacsy 

Joaquín Sorolla 

Edwin Austin Abbey 

Haddon Sundblom 

Mike Jittlov 

Frank Reilly 

Fred Fixler 

Domenico Morelli 

Stanhope Forbes

Frank Bramley 

Ilya Repin 

Edwin Blashfield 

Frank Millet 

N.C. Wyeth 

Vladimir Peter "Bill" Tytla 

Kay Nielsen 

Maxfield Parrish 

Frank Frazetta 

Moebius (Jean Giraud) 

Hal Foster 

Alex Raymond 

How to Apply the Warm-and-Cool Approach

Gary asks about the warm-and-cool approach: 

"I can not see if there is, or should be, a rationale for when a warm or cool tone is used. I believe that this approach brings life to a drawing but do not understand how to best apply it."

Jim asks: "I would also love a good explanation of the warm/cool approach. Obviously the value must be correct, but how does one decide to use a warm or cool color? Is it based on local color of the object? Is it based on light vs. shadow? Is it based on a combination of both? If so, which trumps the other when they conflict? That is, what color should be used to depict a cool shadow on a red ball? What elements are portrayed as gray (an even mix of warm and cool) within a picture? It's worth figuring out, because it's amazing how much "color" can be achieved with just Burnt Sienna (warm) and Ultramarine Blue (cool)."

Richard Parkes Bonington

Gary and Jim, The way I think of warm and cool is that I'm basically doing a value study, but just taking the first step toward color. The warm pigment might describe an area lit by a warm light source, or you might use the warm color to suggest a local color that is intrinsically warm, such as an orange building. If the warm-cool exercise is a preliminary study for a painting that you intend to paint later with full color, the study will give you an impression of what the final will feel like. The limitations of chroma and hue choices keeps you from straying too far away from making primarily value-oriented decisions. 

It's very similar to the way musical composers will figure things out on the piano and then build their orchestration. A composer might work out the melody, rhythm, and chord structure before deciding on the instrumentation.

A simple warm and cool palette such as ultramarine vs. raw sienna is also a worthy approach for finished works. Many painters of the past sought the muted harmonies of warm and cool to achieve a feeling of quietude, dignity, or austerity.

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Previously: Color: Warm and Cool

Weaving warm and cool threads throughout a picture

Free PDF with gouache materials