Mar
4
2010
Acrylic Painting: Someone’s Watching Me!
Author: Sandra ColleRainSomeone’s Watching
18″ x 24″ Acrylic on Canvas
Location: Castle Howard in England
Copyright Sandra ColleRain
The reflections in the lake were what caught my attention as I stood on a hill across from Castle Howard. Lakes do not have the geometry which I painted, colors on water just slide into each other in a continuous gradient as if they are all interconnected riding on top of the water. One color just seems to slip into another, so silently.
But I am a hard-edge painter, I avoid blending one area into another, instead I look for shapes. From a huge amount of merging color, I pulled the shapes I wanted and then made up my own color scheme to express the feeling of the lake. In reality there was only solid green interwoven with a dark grayish black. I wanted color variations and needed light colors to express the mood I felt from the scene.
The vegetation in the foreground was only a blur from my viewpoint so I was forced to just draw an abstraction of what was really there. All artists must by nature of painting use abstraction to a certain extent. You can never match reality exactly. The artist makes a choice how close he wants to come to reality. I like to wander around somewhere in the middle, not realism and not abstraction. Perhaps some of each. I like walking the boundary of what is real and what isn’t.
I painted in my sketch of the foreground plants. Sometimes I painted a reversal of what was there, objects became background and background became objects, like a photographic negative, dark became light and light became dark….spontaneously following the shapes and hoping I didn’t paint myself into an impossible corner.
I backed up across the room for an overview and in the right corner was “one of them.” A visitor to my painting….uninvited. There seemed to be a character or two, a fairy doing a dance….ON MY CANVAS….spontaneous…..appearing from nowhere, but welcome, nonetheless. Like the fairy in the plants, I wanted to dance in exuberance of the scene before me.
Written by Sandra ColleRain Copyright ©2010
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Tags: abstraction, acrylic, artist, Castle Howard, color schemes color variations, colors to create mood, England, fairy in the plants, lake, painting, photographic negative, shape painting
