Studio Work 5/26

Today dropped of work for an upcoming show at the Outpost Performance Center.

One of the paintings in this show is the painting I worked on for most of the month of May:

Untitled, 43"x43", oil on panel

In my last post about this painting, I said that it was inspired by a painting by Childe Hassam.  It is, but in the weird way of painting, I didn't know that when I began.  I began the painting with the idea of doing a painting with colors that would suggest a time of day.  A short time after I began the painting, I was having some troubles with color mixing, and picked up a painting book by Julia Aristides: Classical Painting Atelier.  On a page covering Impressionism, there in a painting by Childe Hassam were the colors I was using.  I wasn't consciously exploring Impressionism.  However, after thinking about it more, my last elective seminar in the MFA program was on the relationship between painting and photography with a photographer, Liz Deschenes.  One topic we discussed was the interaction between painting and photography as there was as a shift towards direct observation of the landscape.  One artist we talked about was John Constable, who painted a whole series of sky paintings, detailing the exact conditions in which the painting was created.  There were both photographers and painters (Claude Monet is a good example) who would capture/depict images of the same subject under different conditions -- the primary variable being light.  I found this fascinating, and considered a series of paintings based on the light and colors of the sky during different times of day.  I quickly discovered this idea has been hashed over many times.  I am not yet sure whether that matters.  But I find the history of this idea to be worth looking into.