Rainy Douglas SOLD There is something positively plaintive about a rainy day. This stretch of shops with its lone car really pulls at my nostalgia thread. The most difficult part is not the wet street; it is the compression of values to be seen in the windows at the left with the warm tones fading into vague structure. Rather than try to exactly represent these, it is best to leave much of that to the imagination. Every person has their very own prop department in their brain. When I say, "fireplace," you conjure up that prop from your back rooms. If I suggest it is large, you fill in the details and make it large. When you have a passage in a painting that is vague, your brain will feel a sense of mystery, a curiosity, and it will figure out what it thinks best represents reality. Almost every passage in a painting that is in shadow or very dim light, needs only the vaguest suggestions to render an image (think of any Rembrandt painting). Remember, at night, our eyes use...
This is a work that started as a pencil sketch. I stood on the curb and sketched this simple view and then snapped many photos, bracketing the exposure to replicate (as closely as possible) the look of the shadows and highlights. It is entirely possible to capture the look of a scene very accurately with a simple camera on a phone as long as you can control exposure in specific areas. On my iPhone, I can essentially change the exposure infinitely (I say that that advisedly as my physics friends would really spank me on that assertion). I change the exposure for, say, the street. I take the photo then immediately check it against what I see in front of me. If it is off, I delete it, adjust the exposure, and take another. I repeat this process for each area. I took a photo with the exposure of the pale yellow area of the building in mind. I took one of the lower part of the sky and one of the middle and one of the upper. I took one of the brightly lighted orange area of the building, a...
Ford Douglas. 30x24. Oil on linen. $1760--SOLD. This painting was one of the hits of the Diver Studio show and sold recently. I really like the combination of realism and sketchy impressionistic techniques which give it a real depth. Most beginning painters feel the need to render each and every part of the painting at the same level of detail. This is always a mistake. The star of the show is the focal point. All else must be subservient to that star. The Ford in this painting is rendered in near photorealism, a technique that is not that hard; whereas, a sketchier rendering is far more difficult because it must look natural and it must convey the sense of the objects in the painting without falling into the uncanny valley. Sounds like an old horror film, doesn't it? The concept of the uncanny valley is that on a sliding scale from completely abstract to exactly realistic, on the side of exact realism there is an area where just being slightly off in drawing or values causes ...
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