The daily dose of art TOWN AND CITYSCAPES

Staying with the long and narrow for at least another day, looking at cities and towns.  Creating these paintings starts with a day long task of photographing everything and anything in the selected village, because at the outset I usually don't know how the piece will be composed.  Since most of these were done before the digital age, I would end up with dozens of photos spread out before me on one of the large drawing tables.  Then the fun would begin, looking, arranging, and rearranging until I finally came up with the composition that came closest to depicting the subject with some semblance of geographic accuracy.

 

 Baltimore's Inner Harbor, above, and Newport RI, below were two of the more challenging compositions to create.  The Inner Harbor had to be "straightened", and Newport had to be seen from the water, but all my photos were on land.  Both paintings called for some artistic liberty.

 

This view of St. Michael's, on Maryland's Eastern Shore is from photos taken from a dear friend's boat.  More than anything else I remember the delicious Red Snapper Soup Betty served us.

SECOND THOUGHTS

Three years ago I completed this 20x30 canvas, painting over a previous "failed" painting.  It has been on and off the walls of the gallery and studio since then, gathering minimum attention.

 It wasn't until 3 or 4 weeks ago that I realized what a compositional blunder I created...four almost equal horizontal bands across the canvas.  I don't understand why it took me so long to see this.  In order to create something more interesting to the eye I've broken the horizontals with one dominant vertical, and will look at it for awhile to determine if it needs even more.  I'm thinking it needs something more in the lower right foreground.

COMPOSITION

As I’ve mentioned before, I had to teach myself how to work with watercolors, and I did so using what I have since clalled my coloring book approach. This entailed starting with a clean ink drawing, and then applying the wc neatly within the lines, without working wet in wet or graded washes, two of the more difficult skills of wc painting. Avoiding skies, trees, and everything else except the subject, almost always a building of some sort, the painting, by default, became a vignette.

As my vision expanded and the subjects became more complicated, I learned to become more creative in composing the painting, maintaining the vignette approach. Eventually I learned to paint skies, trees, and whatever, but still in the vignette format.

The following paintings show a progression from earliest to later work, from about 1980 to 1990.