Another Painting Workshop

Friday ended a week long painting workshop here with artist, teacher Bruce Williamson, a painter from Texas who repeated his visit last year with another one this past week.

Bruce treats every subject as a recipient of light, whether it’s a landscape, a still life or a portrait.

Bruce doing a portrait demo outside.

Some of his starting concepts:

Have a goal – what do you want the painting to be about

Shape- placement of lights, shadows, shapes

Values or tones ( urghhhh, values….)

Color-

Texture

In that order, using that outline, a painting ought to be successful even if you paint waves in pinks or a face in blues.

A fellow workshop painter

I bow the very deepest bow I can take without falling on my head to every plein air painter. The town dogcatcher has an easier time retrieving feral beasts with a lasso than I do, painting outside in the shifting sun.

To achieve an accurate painting and not just a sweet little drawing  requires constant checking, thinking, evaluating, measuring and that seems to thwart the process of even getting the brush to the canvas. It helped me to think of this as strictly an exercise of embarrassed learning and forego the idea that these would be finished pieces.

Just the initial block in of the above scene ( minus the horizontal volleyball net ) which I’m going to work towards completion.

I took a palette knife and scraped off the first few attempts until I got a few bones I thought I could work with.

Better to have painted and scraped than never to have painted at all- words to live by as invoked by the fellow below:

I’ll be away for a week and eager to get back to the easel so I don’t lose the lessons.

There were three lovely awards sent my way this week which I’m so pleased to have received. Thank you Theresa, Nava and Marian!

Tags: Bruce Williamson, oil painters, painting workshop, scraping paintings, St. Croix painters