ReesRiver1.1

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Comment by Richard Robinson on November 18, 2011 at 11:52

Thanks Harald. You're welcome.

Comment by Harald Skog on November 17, 2011 at 19:32

The size of this is 33x41cm. It`s acrylic on canvas board.

Comment by Harald Skog on November 17, 2011 at 19:30

Thanks for the good words that almoust make me feel like an atrist, but even a greater thank you for the critiquesn that might help me to bee one.  Harald

Comment by Richard Robinson on November 14, 2011 at 18:24

 

Hi Harald, thanks for your painting. Here are my thoughts on it:

 

Design

I always look at the design in terms of dark and light first and then in terms of colour. Is it interesting? Is it varied? Is it natural or too contrived? Those are the sorts of questions I ask myself. Looking at the 2 value breakdown of your design which is really the bones of the painting I think you’ve achieved an interesting balance of organic shapes. I would have personally preferred to make the left hand bank of the river more sinuous - you’ve straightened it out a lot which takes away some of the interest it might have had, and I don’t see that it adds anything to the design making it straighter.

 

Colour

In terms of colour design it’s nice to see you playing warms off against cools like that which certainly adds interest to the painting. Having green on one side of the river and orange on the other sets up a tension in the painting and has my eyes flicking back and forth trying to figure out why there’s this battle of colour across the river.

It’s nice to see the warms and cools both on the large scale and in the individual brushstrokes helping one another. I think it’s a shame you missed the opportunity to gray these colours progressively as they move back into the scene - at the moment it’s very much strong foreground colours and then straight to gray background colours, skipping the transition between the two. I would prefer to see some more colour interest in the sky too, which you can do by adding clouds or mist etc, but perhaps with all that painterly work in the rest of the painting it’s good to have a quiet area like this for the eye to rest, but hey, it’s all personal taste.

 

Brushwork

It looks to me like you have a freedom with paint that will allow you to create some really beautiful juicy work if you can knuckle down a bit and learn some more about drawing. Many painters are afraid to lay thick paint on so it’s nice to see you’re not afraid - the paint should be afraid though. (Uh oh, here comes Harald!). Jokes. Beware of building up too much texture where you want the paint to sit back though, like in dark areas and in the far-ground. I usually prefer to see a thin vs thick relationship happening throughout the painting rather than all thick or all thin. Variation is key.

 

Realism

I’d rate this about a 5/10 for realism. From a distance the scene is quite easily readable but pretty soon I start to question what’s going on in the foreground which says to me that you weren’t sure yourself and that basically comes down to drawing. By drawing I mean the learned skill of seeing something, understanding it’s form and capturing that in paint. Like I said, that takes some knuckling down - the discipline to look at the subject for a good half an hour and figuring out what’s going on before you pick up the brush. Although a good painting may look as though the painter has just slapped the paint on, most of those beautiful daubs of paint have been well considered before each stroke. John Singer Sargent (one of my favorites) was known to step back 10 feet after every single brushstroke, measuring its worth and scraping it off if it wasn’t perfectly eloquent. That's a bit daunting isn't it? But inspiring too I think.

 

Hope that helps some.

All the best.

Comment by Richard Robinson on November 14, 2011 at 12:59

Hi Harald, what's the size of this one?