Abstracting the landscape
This term we looked at famous abstract artists and their landscape paintings. We discussed how to abstract the landscape by taking away some of what we see and simplifying what we see. It is much harder to do this than it looks because to paint an abstract one has to make decisions as to what to take out and to keep that which is important in terms of pattern and colour. It is much easier to paint figuratively as we soon found out.
We started with an exercise. We divided a large page into six squares and looking at a photo of a landscape we found the big shapes which we drew with a black marker pen. Next we used one of these drawings and using a big brush and a very restricted palette of just two colours, yellow and blue plus paynes grey and white we painted another page of six small abstracts. Big bold brush marks was our aim!
By the end of the term we were all exhausted by the effort of all those decisions but we felt the term had been worthwhile and we should be able to take away the idea that we do not have to copy exactly what we see when painting using a photo or when painting from life.
