In Search of The Story

There are painters who will paint almost any topic as a demonstration of their ability to make a common element magical through watercolor technique. I certainly am not one of them. I need to get into the spirit of the topic in order to stimulate my painting effort. the last series, The Prima Kitchen, was actually a story on the chefs, line cooks and cooking process behind the scenes and was very successful. Unfortunately as i was low on funds and rushed to complete the exhibit i did not retain any quality images of the work and that was a mistake due to its reception by many folks. that won't happen again.

Once more i am on the search for a topic. I have spent many days going over old studies, photographs, slides etc. in search of a story. i am getting close, going back to my roots as an urban design consultant in small towns in the Pacific Northwest, BC and Canada. and now instead of just painting isolated images, i am threading together resource images of abandoned industrial buildings, mountain views from the Alaskan ferry and even groups of people in various clustered compositions on the ferry or in certain small towns. since i am not good at faces, the clusters and composition of the group become the strengths of the painting, not the facial features--one thing i struggled with and learned from the last "Prima Kitchen" series and exhibit.

Bottom line: what is the story? what is the spirit within the images that connects them? ahhhh. liking that.

Keep painting and i will check in in about two weeks as i get into composition and value studies.

Ron K

The Challenge of Over-working

I am one of those painters that too often just jumps in to my work and wind up over-painting, either too many colors, too bright or high key etc. trying to restrain myself and still keep the intensity is a challenge for sure. after struggling this late fall with works related to the last blog, i set that subject aside, did some reading and reflecting and came up with a an obvious but ignored (by me) technique to step back. Namely, select a simple contrast and stick to it! in this case and the example included below, "Kitchen Kollaboration", i simply restricted myself to a color  complement principle: orange and blue, orange gray and blue grays with a touch of subtle blue green at a diagonal (bottle upper corner and plates in lower right). otherwise the dominant color complement is orange and blue. boy, did it make a big difference in that i was not over-coloring, creating too much distraction in color and forgetting value. the simple complement enabled me to focus on value and composition rather than trying to represent every shape in the composition.   i hope this helps as it really set me on a fun course again and i now have four done in this new series on the Kitchens of Langley.  Have fun and keep painting, Ron K.