What Artists Had to Say

Today’s Image

In the Studio

Still working on my acrylic of a backyard scene here in the studio. I made good progress since last blog as shown in Today’s Image.

I filled in more of the foliage and shrubbery using mixtures in various proportions of Liquitex Basics Hooker’s Green Hue Permanent and Grumbacher Cadmium Yellow Medium. These two provided quite a range of shades. I also used these to fill in the grassy areas and added Liquitex Heavy Body Brilliant Yellow Green for the sunniest areas. I painted one of the main shrubs, which is on the right, using mixtures in various proportions of Liquitex Heavy Body Alizarin Crimson Hue Permanent, Liquitex Heavy Body Red Oxide, and Van Gogh Warm Grey. As with the foliage, these colors provided a good array of dark to light contrasts on the plant’s leaves. Using this same mixture, but diluted with water, I washed over the area on the left that will be bright flowering shrubs to neutralize the white of the canvas.

I think I only need to add the flowering shrubs and put in some finishing touches of highlight and shadow.

Artists’ Quotes

I want to bring the blogging on creativity back around to art after saying how creativity is universal and that you can be creative in many forms and aspects of life. So, I wondered what artists of note had to say, if anything. Wouldn’t you know there’s a website devoted to artists' quotes, Artquotes.net? Using that site as the source, I randomly looked up a few artists’ quotes and culled out a few in no particular order as interesting if not insightful:

• Pablo Picasso – “The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place; from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.”
• Gustave Courbet – “The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it.”
• Marc Chagall – “I am out to introduce a psychic shock into my painting, one that is always motivated by pictorial reasoning: that is to say, a fourth dimension.”
• Grant Wood – “I realized that all the really good ideas I'd ever had came to me while I was milking a cow. So I went back to Iowa.”
• Georgia O’Keeffe – “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way--things I had no words for.”
• Eugene Delacroix – “What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.”
• Francisco Goya – “Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.”
• Berthe Morisot – “It is important to express oneself...provided the feelings are real and are taken from you own experience.”
• Claude Monet – “It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.”
• Henri Matisse – “Creativity takes courage.”

Cheers!