Having had to stay home the previous Wednesday with another outbreak of the stomach bug, I had a chance to try my hand at a larger blank canvas in my bedroom for three hours with no teacher supervision. As much as I think my landscape teacher is great, she does have the habit of ‘intruding’ on my creative process. I had decided to work from a photograph of the sunrise that I posted in my previous blog. The following Wednesday was a flu-free day and I brought my sunrise canvas to class to work on. Instead, I put it on a back burner and tried to follow along with another lesson on layering landscapes. My teacher painted over my small canvas several times and I was pretty discouraged by the end of class. The fruit of that class for me was getting to workshop mixing colors to match the painting that we were working from, another painting from the Plein Air magazine. A major weakness of my painting stems from my lack of mastery of the color wheel so this was a necessary frustration for me to grow in the area of color mixing and matching.
It wasn’t until the following class that I experienced some satisfaction with my sunrise canvas. I worked solely on this canvas for the duration of the class with instructor guidance pulling me through when I felt I should just trash the thing and move on. I found the experience, once again, of removing my emotional attachment to a piece, allowing me the freedom to take the necessary risks to save the painting. As I was blending and layering my sky, I had been putting blue on top of yellow, and large sections of my sky looked green and unattractive. The teacher helped me remedy the problem by putting a peachy white over top of it. I also discovered that the white I was using was transparent Zinc white and that I needed Titanium white to cover the painting. I was feeling a good working relationship that day between myself the painting and the teacher. I was open enough to instruction and she gave the right instruction while respected my ownership over the canvas. She did paint on it a little but it wasn’t the white washing of my work that I had experienced before. I made several attempts to move the painting forward. I added some gold paint, I painted a cloud over the giant orange sun, and then filled in between the clouds with a pleasant sky blue color.
Towards the end of the class, my teacher Sylvia stood behind me and said in her dramatic way, “It’s happening.” “It’s not done yet but it’s getting close.” I let out an interior sigh of relief. Here are the process pictures from that class. The first image is the final stage of the painting.
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