Winslow Homer:
Look at nature, work independently, and solve your own problems.
Creative Expression- "What's the best way to say it?"
This month's piece for improvement is a painting of the landmark light house in Maine. A couple of years ago, I came back from a trip to Maine, then based on my sketch and photos, I painted this light house and liked what I did. However, this summer when I had another look at this piece, I started to wonder how I can create better expression using the same subject matter.
Originally, this painting was done as vignette style - a way to greatly emphasize on the subject matter its self, and leave everything else in a very simple and "sketchy" way. The expression I created in this painting was exactly as I originally planned, and the finished piece was a somewhat satisfying piece of artwork.
How can I do better, then?
After determine "what I am going to paint?", the next most important question an artist should ask herself is "What's the best way to express my feelings through the subject matter?"
Art is all about creation and expression, and with one same subject matter, there are many different ways to interpret and describe the beauty of the subject. Just capture every detail of a subject is the job of a good camera, not a job of a good artist. To me, it is more important that an artist always tries to seek an unique expression for her feelings in any painting.
This time I choose using atmosphere light to express an stunning moment of summer sunset as i experienced when I sketched and took a reference photo of the scene in Maine.
So I painted this painting again with the main emphasis on the overall sunset atmosphere. I kept reminding myself about the source and color of the light. The expression I wanted to create is all about the stunning moment when the summer warm sunset moves its orange light beam across the lighthouse before it sinks behind horizon. So I poured the most transparent yellow and reds into wet paper to create a strong orange lighting effects of sunset, and carefully left the highlights as whites. I also worked on range of complimentary colors - light hue of purples and blues into the shadows of the light house, but kept the overall painting with a very warm orange-red tone.
Here you can also see some details of trees I painted using the same concept above - under the strong orange lights, the real life green or brown trees can also be painted with just pure yellow, oranges or even reds, and they still give viewers the symbolic impression of vivid trees.
When under a specific color light source, the subject matter very often will lose its original local color, say, a white light house can appear to have light purple-ihs tint if there is a cool source of lighting in the early morning before the sun rise, or shown with strong orange read as if a sunset touches it. Meantime, Shadows are not dark when the light is very strong, and all darks and lights will appear a lot lighter, all of these should be in a beautiful group of color and value shapes. The end result of this improved painting, has a strong and creative expression, and by comparison, better described the subject matter than the original.