study - MILES OF BLUE © Sharon L Hicks, 2013
I've mentioned before about my early memories of the sky over the Tantramar marsh, and today's study shows just a tiny section of that 360 degree dome. Whichever way you turn, there is wide open sky. You can stand in one spot with camera in hand, rotate, and end up with a myriad of different views of the same dome. You can tip your head back and rotate it, to fully appreciate the 'dome' effect of that blue vastness, on all sides and overhead at the same time. As the flat marshes go on 'for miles and miles', so does the blue dome overhead. It's almost magical. At least that's the way I remember it.
Early memories tend to play an important role for most artists. Someone who grows up near the sea, for example, might display an aptitude for painting boats, and waves, and shorelines. Like writers, who are advised to “write what you know”, the same goes for visual artists - we paint our best when we paint what we know.
To really be able to portray a subject so it is 'believable', it's important to spend time getting to know that subject. All nuances of the subject. The way it looks, the way it smells, the way it feels, the way it affects us. Then when you do start to paint it, all those underlying 'understandings' will shine through in the work, and it creates more than 'just a replica' of the subject, whatever it may be.
Here's the progression from photo to completed study, as usual ...
my photo after 10 minutes after 1 hour
Here again I've done some cropping, to zero in on what I felt was the most important portion of the scene. The foreground was reduced to a narrow strip, which directs attention to the sky and emphasizes its predominance in the scene. Colours were 'normalized' to take into account the colour distortion created by the photographic process. Cloud shapes were simplified somewhat, again to clarify the focus and also to accommodate the time restriction implicit in this series of one-hour studies.
Stay tuned tomorrow for study # 14 ...
cheers
Sharon
