My nephew stood waiting for my brother to play pickleball. I was intrigued by my nephew’s blend of polite deference and impatience and how it showed in his posture as he leaned onto the patio chair. I snapped a photo and used it as a reference for this gouache sketch.
We gathered, my sisters and our younger female relatives, to celebrate my sister’s significant birthday. We walked along the Arizona Canal, where we were captivated by the sky, suculants, mountains, and reflections. Then everyone arranged themselves across a footbridge so I could take a group photo to paint this morning.
My Tuesday night still-life group has made a change for the fall. We begin our weekly sessions by viewing select artwork from artists who paint in distinctive styles. Then, using a still life or photo, we attempt to evoke something of the artist while we paint for 90- minutes.
Our artist this evening was the portrait painter Alice Neel. She often emphasized her subjects’ personalities by enlarging eyes and heads, elongating limbs, simplifying everything, and adding emphasis with lines. She placed her models on the canvas as though they were seated directly across from her and minimized the background.
I used a photo from a few summers ago that I thought would be a good reference because it was a close-up and caught a pensive look.
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My Tuesday night still-life group has made a change for the fall. We begin our weekly sessions by viewing select artwork from artists who paint in distinctive styles. Then, using a still life or photo, we attempt to evoke something of the artist while we paint for 90- minutes.
Our artist this evening was David Park, who was part of the Bay Area Figurative Movement in the 1950s. He used intense color, unusual perspective, and geometric abstraction to create paintings with psychological depth and mystery. He often painted people in boats and along the beach.
I used a photo from this past summer of people paddling about in rented boats because the colors were so bright, and I thought it would be a good reference for tonight. I like this sketch but need to go darker and more abstract if I want to paint in David Park’s style.
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On Wednesday, we had an excellent model for our figure-drawing group. She paired each of her twenty-minute poses with a different attitude, and she was so adept at this that it was easy to capture something unique with each drawing. For this pose, I thought she looked like she was swapping stories about an event gone wrong with a group of friends.
My Tuesday night still-life group has made a change for the fall. We begin our weekly sessions by viewing select artwork from artists who paint in distinctive styles. Then, using a still life or photo, we attempt to evoke something of the artist while we paint for 90- minutes.
This evening, we painted under the influence of Georgia O’Keeffe, known for painting close-up views of simplified objects, often with bold colors. We each chose an object, such as this red rose, to focus closely on.
My Tuesday night still-life group has made a change for the fall. We begin our weekly sessions by viewing select artwork from artists who paint in distinctive styles. Then, using a still life or photo, we attempt to evoke something of the artist while we paint for 90- minutes.
This week, we considered Fairfield Potter’s interior scenes with figures, which often communicate a calm, friendly vibe through the use of warm colors and ordinary household items. The person who set up for tonight composed three photographs to work from that included her son, dog, and cat. For the background, I used my fireplace and its adjoining wall.
Deliberate Sketching 