Another Painting Class, Session 2: Painting 8

In February/March I took an online painting class at Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia, PA. The class was called BLENDING ABSTRACTION AND REPRESENTATION, and over 5 sessions our class explored the continuum between these two endpoints of a line. This set of classes is a continuation of the previous group with the same teacher and the same group of students.

The class was structured so that we worked on our individual artworks in our home studios while participating in discussions and vewing demonstrations by the teacher. I did quite a bit of work and I’ll be showing them to you over a few posts.

Thanks to my instructor, Lesa Chittenden Lim, and my classmates, for a good experience.

As I said in the previous post in this series, the class assignment was to use a color we did not ordinarily feature in our paintings as the main hue. I interpreted that to mean not only did I not feature it but I did not really like it as well as others, either, and maybe for reasons that had nothing to do with the color, but maybe it was the paint tube mechanics or that I hate squeezing out paint from nearly empty tubes. (I know. Crazy.)

Here is the second painting I made for this assignment. It was based on this photo I took a couple of years ago at Lake Galena, near Chalfont, PA:

I chose the colors red and gray for this picture. I first drew in the plants with red paint, then filled in around it. Gradually I added more and more colors and refined the shapes.

I am not sure why I don’t like red much; I do know I’ve felt this way all my life about it. I remember my parents choosing red carpet for my childhood room and I was not happy about it, so the feeling goes back some years, you may say.

Gray, I find to be a very useful color and I use it often, but it is not major player in a composition for me. It has fallen into the reliable workhorse category.

I do think I will lean on gray more in the future. Let it have more of a voice.

I will also have a better attitude about red, as I think it looks good in combination with the other colors in this piece, but it is still lower down on my list of colors that make me feel good to work with. Maybe we just need to get better acquainted and let old disputes fall away?

I like how things ended up. I have got a stalky space plant from another planet garden going here, I think.

The painting is called “At Lake Galena” and it is 20″ x 16″, acrylics on canvas.

11 thoughts on “Another Painting Class, Session 2: Painting 8”

    1. Claudia McGill Post author

      Thank you, I have several shades of gray and in this painting I used them all, plus I alternated with the other colors and did not clean the brush, so, I got a lot of good shades. I think that unifies the picture.

    1. Claudia McGill Post author

      Thank you. This painting certainly took me somewhere I did not expect, but I like how it turned out. I am still not fond of red, but, it is a very useful color, that I knew, and this painting reinforces that to me.

    1. Claudia McGill Post author

      Thank you. I would not have said, hey, I will work with red and gray, but the picture went that way once I picked the gray color, and I am happy with the result. It reminds me not to overlook certain colors and to vary things more often from the start of the piece.

    1. Claudia McGill Post author

      Thank you. I’m still trying to comprehend how I ended up with this (I think it is a good thing) and I guess the key is, reach for some unexpected elements and see where you go with it, rather than sticking with tried and true habitual.

    1. Claudia McGill Post author

      Thank you. I realized partway through the work I was wandering off the assignment and the look of the photo, but…it all turned out ok and I did learn some things about my reliance on certain color choices.

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