Saturday, August 29, 2009
Celestial Paintings
Friends of Patricia (and mine too, now) have rented the Landsdowne Theatre and Coffeeshop for Monday evening, the 31st. Marty and Elliot have been flying around the world in recent years chasing solar eclipses. They will be showing their travel videos for all the people who have been interested in following their exploits. There will be friendly people, live music, and general milling about. I volunteered to add my collection of Lunar Paintings to the occasion.
By now my Collected Lunar Paintings look like this, hanging in my apartment:
Marty and Elliot thought that idea was fine, but reminded me that they are chasing SOLAR eclipses, not LUNAR eclipses.
Whups!
So I decided that in the week remaining I would paint a series of panels that feature a solar eclipse, and then I could provide a CELESTIAL display for the occasion. Thinking about depicting a solar eclipse turned out to be an interesting exercise, and it sure has kept me busy all this week. I ended up painting six panels, and worked on them all at the same time so that the colors would be consistent from one panel to another.
The style continues what I did for the Lunar Paintings, definitely a change from the figurative work I had been doing up to now, and even from the abstractions I was playing around with earlier this summer:
As an aside, any discussion of “color” stresses the importance of how much the appearance of a color depends on what it is next to. That shows up so well in this sequence. The foreground is a dark green, overlapping a light green. In the first and last panels, the light green almost disappears and the dark green is predominant. But in the middle panels the opposite is true. They are exactly the same shades of green throughout.
By now my Collected Lunar Paintings look like this, hanging in my apartment:
Marty and Elliot thought that idea was fine, but reminded me that they are chasing SOLAR eclipses, not LUNAR eclipses.
Whups!
So I decided that in the week remaining I would paint a series of panels that feature a solar eclipse, and then I could provide a CELESTIAL display for the occasion. Thinking about depicting a solar eclipse turned out to be an interesting exercise, and it sure has kept me busy all this week. I ended up painting six panels, and worked on them all at the same time so that the colors would be consistent from one panel to another.
The style continues what I did for the Lunar Paintings, definitely a change from the figurative work I had been doing up to now, and even from the abstractions I was playing around with earlier this summer:
Eclipse Series
Acrylic and Oil on Board, 14"x 11"
Acrylic and Oil on Board, 14"x 11"
As an aside, any discussion of “color” stresses the importance of how much the appearance of a color depends on what it is next to. That shows up so well in this sequence. The foreground is a dark green, overlapping a light green. In the first and last panels, the light green almost disappears and the dark green is predominant. But in the middle panels the opposite is true. They are exactly the same shades of green throughout.
Labels: eclipse, luna, lunar, moon, oil painting, solar, sun
