Friday, July 24, 2015

Another Painting Sold - Birds on a Wire Series

Sold another painting!  This one I really love.  Well, I guess I love them all.  They are me.

This will require a wee bit of pre-painting background explanation.  A couple years ago an exhibit came to the MFAH - Picasso in Black and White.  That title did not thrill me at ALL.  As you can likely tell from my paintings, I'm a color kind of girl.  However, I felt beholden to go, so I picked a day and toddled innocently into the exhibit.

It blew me away!  Expecting small pencil and ink drawings on paper, I couldn't have been more wrong!  We had a huge exhibit of large canvases, not in all honesty black and white!  I had planned on breezing through the show and then making a scheduled workshop downtown later that day.  Five hours later I stumbled out onto the pavement in a daze.

Missed the workshop - who needed it anyway?

What he had done was covered his canvases with color.  Arbitrarily (maybe).  Then he painted out the negative space (background) and left thin lines of color describing his subject.  All else was the negative space he painted, which was usually white.  Wow, was I inspired! 

Looking back now as I type, I think, 'Inspired?!'  Yeah, I guess so!  I've been pretty much painting in this manner ever since!

This is how I painted my birds.  I filled the background with color - shades of blue, textures and designs, and gold.  Once that was dry, I began to paint the negative space, in other words, everything BUT the birds and the wires they are on.  That way the background showed through in all its glorious colors.  I LIKE it.

That exhibit really changed the way I paint.  All you need to do is look at my paintings since then to see that.  So... I give you, my birds:
 Here's the complete painting. I really just love it.  I particularly like the way the whites are thicker and more opaque down on the left bottom corner, and thin out more toward the top right so you can understand what's going on and get a better hint of what's underneath.

The bottom two pictures are cutaways of the larger painting so you can see more detail.


 You can see in this first cutaway that there is more than just white here - that would be boring!  Can you see the little hint of pinks?

If I remember correctly, I think I added a bit of yellow into the white as well up toward the top.  These go a long way in warming up the painting.

Next time I'll show you another of my paintings in that series that is still for sale.

Thanks, Picasso!



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