A Day in the Life of the New Rennasiance

I started adding color to my painting last class!  It was so exciting.  Cliff, just having his mouse infusion was back to his cheery joking self and everyone seemed to be in good spirits because of this.  Carol had found some peace as she explained she had "put her sister in the freezer" a technique administered in hope of her sister chilling out, and the usual drama continued.  Menopausal womens' chit chat aside, I think my painting really is coming along quite nicely.  Even with the first glaze of color, the painting appeared to have greater depth.  In following the Carracci
Tradition, I first painted a black and white underpainting and then will be adding thin color glazes until the painting is completed in full color.  The master's were right in essentially painting their subjects twice.

 

 

Renaissance Painting

I am taking a painting class in the Carracci Tradition.  The Carracci tradition comes out of a school of thinking during the Renaissance that describes the way artists paint.  Objective painting, or painting what you see in reality as opposed to copying a photograph or other painting, is practiced.  Drawing accurately is the first step of painting in the Carracci tradition!  This excites me because I enjoy drawing and consider myself to have a practiced eye.  Since beginning architecture school, I have believed that it is important to train oneself how to see in order to draw convincingly.  Although my previous paintings have been less photo realistic than my work in this class, I have always striven to find correct proportions in the objects I am painting.

In addition to painting from life, there is a method to applying pigment in the Carracci tradition.  First one begins by painting a monochrome underpainting.  Once completed, one glazes color pigments atop the underpainting.  These glazes have a high amount of medium and/or vehicle relative to the amount of oil paint.  It is important to understand the viscosity and opacity of different paints in order to apply even coats that make up the painting.

I am in the monochromatic underpainting stage of the process.  I am painting a still life composed of a miniature Chinese clay soldier, a platter of fruit, a small pitcher, and a flower.  A striped cloth is draped behind the composition.

I realize this blog post sounds more like an essay than a usual entry, but in order to keep current on what is happening in my Thursday painting classes one has to understand the background.  In fact, this is an abridged version of my first class where my teacher, lets call him my maestro, explained his painting theory -only with bits of his life spliced in.  If he can move on from the typewriter, he should write a blog!  The University of Cliff Smith, that is what some of the veteran students call the class.  Cliff is quite a character, and in our class over the art store he is able to teach fully in the Carracci tradition, free of the usual curriculum requirements of the colleges he also teaches at.

For fun, here is a look at some of the paintings I have done prior to this class.