ARC Salon 2009

Every year, the Art Renewal Center's online salon gives out prizes to awe inspiring paintings & sculptures in the classical realism genre. Which gives me a good excuse to link to some beautiful artworks.

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Learning to paint

I've always been reasonably adequate at drawing what I see, but for some reasons, when it comes to painting (figures & portraits specifically), I fumbled like a clown trying to juggle baby crocodiles while standing on top of five stacked beach balls.

There seems to be some links missing in my brain, that are supposed to connect one skill to another.

What's the difference between drawing & painting?

I feel comfortable with drawing because there's only one variable that I have to control: the values (ie. darkness). By varying the density of the applied medium, I can define light & shadow, shape & form quite easily.
Similarly, I can paint reasonably well as long as it's limited to only one color, but attempts to create a "real painting" (ie. a picture with full color ranges) mostly end up becoming a color mess.

As I gradually improved my skills over the years, I've learnt to work with 2 tones. I'll establish the values with a dark color, then use a light color to add highlights to different areas. It's an improvement, but still far from a full color painting.

So now what?

Not long ago I discovered traditional painting techniques like glazing & scumbling, meaning the artist will apply transparent color layers on top of monotoned underpaintings, thus build up richly colored surfaces.
(see an example here)

Sounds easy enough right? Seems like a perfect solution to my problem.

Well...the concept is easy enough to understand, but the application is definately a lot more complicated. For the start the varieties of mediums & paints out there are enough to confuse any beginners, then the technique itself will require a lot of experiments & learnings to get a hang of.

So this is where I am now, at the monotone stage:



Paintings like these are my inspirations:




I honestly have no idea how far can I take my skills, but I'm not too concerned about it, for now I'll just take it one step at a time and see what happens next.

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John Currin

I've recently discovered the artworks of John Currin on the internet, and I have to say that looking at his paintings gives me an enjoyment that I rarely find with contemporary art. It's so refreshing to see an artist who can actually paint, to present classical aesthetic traditions with a modern flavour.

I'll leave the judgements and controvercies about his paintings to art critics, and let's just take a look at some of them that I've found on the internet:

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