Tuesday, March 31, 2015

"Downtown Austin (Day 12)"

I am so sorry that I am showing you the same painting again. I just can't stop working on it. You heard about overworking, but what I am doing is actuarially working over. I am no longer think this is a painting. It has turned into my laboratory or my academy. In front of this big monster, I am a sincere and serious student. I admit what I don't know, but I want to figure them out by analysis and experiment.

I have noticed at the previous stage of this painting that I had many areas with muddy colors. I didn't have a dominant color tone for the entire painting, so the color harmony was not very obvious. I know myself mainly a "value" painter. My knowledge and skills on color has not been fully developed, even I have worked quite a bit on it before. So these a couple of days, I painted this painting over, and almost completely changed the color scheme. I drove the dominant tone color much cooler and harmonized all the colors with the tone color. The muddy color issue has been controlled better. Weather this painting has improved is still questionable, but I surely know more about color know. I will continue experimenting with this painting, and figure out as much as I can.

3 comments:

Tim said...

I would love to see a gif of all the stages of this painting when you're finally finished!

Andy said...

If I am honest, I would say this looks like someone else's painting now, not one of yours. Of course, we don't know what your next stage is yet, or what you want the end result to look like.

I'll add that my personal preference, from all the stages you've posted, is actually the horizontal "cropped" version you posted on March 13 - DAY 5. Maybe because it is more focused on the street-level activity than the tall buildings. Also, the earthy colours in those early stages remind me of some of Terry Miura's city scenes.

But I have no doubt you will solve all your problems, as you always do, and I'll enjoy this one as much as I enjoy all your other paintings.

Carol Yap said...

I like it both ways before and after.
Will you be at the PleinAir convention in Monterey?