Composition thoughts…..thanks Louise for this video – it certainly made me realise that I never seem to pay much attention to this – I still have a lot to learn! With shapes in mind I had a stroll through the internet looking at paintings & stumbled across Nicolas de Stael. So, between you & NdS I was inspired to take several wanders around the garden & fields with sketch book breaking down the landscape into shapes. Here’s one of the many (Elliot’s blue tent in the olives), & it’s going to be interesting to see how this will seep consciously or subconsciously into my next paintings because it was fascinating & fun & helpful, although I don’t think I’ll make the shapes & colour quite so dramatic…
Composition thoughts…..thanks Louise for this video – it certainly made me realise that I never seem to pay much attention to this – I still have a lot to learn! With shapes in mind I had a stroll through the internet looking at paintings & stumbled across Nicolas de Stael. So, between you & NdS I was inspired to take several wanders around the garden & fields with sketch book breaking down the landscape into shapes. Here’s one of the many (Elliot’s blue tent in the olives), & it’s going to be interesting to see how this will seep consciously or subconsciously into my next paintings because it was fascinating & fun & helpful, although I don’t think I’ll make the shapes & colour quite so dramatic…
Louise Balaam - Monthly Landscape Painting
What an interesting exercise Karen. Nicholas de Stael is a great artist to look at – and you can really see how by simplifying the shapes you can arrive at a kind of abstraction, with a range of interlocking shapes in flat colours (though you’ve actually made the colour areas more interesting by varying the brushstrokes). I absolutely agree that these kinds of exercises feed into and inform your other work at some level, even if it’s not easy to see