Degas to Dali, More Painting

Degas to Dali

Last week I went to see the "Degas to Dali" exhibition of works from the National Galleries of Scotland. It's interesting to see paintings by the so-called "Masters", and I guess at the time they were done they were fairly radical and daring. But to be honest I found it to be fairly unexciting.

I've been to a few of these sorts of exhibitions, and it amazes me how technically inept a lot of the work seems to be. I know the "idea" is supposedly the important thing, but to me it seems that the work should also be well executed. It's as though they didn't care whether the work was done well but just wanted to rattle something off to show how clever they are.

Of course this is not true of all of them - some are extremely well executed as well as being clever and interesting.

More Painting

Another acrylic. This is quite similar to one of my early pastel paintings. I think the end result is reasonably satisfactory. Still learning this new medium, particularly the need to take care of the part that's finished. I wasn't going to have any clouds, but I accidentally spilled some water on the sky so had to cover up the area with clouds (repainting the whole sky would have been near impossible).

Learned a bit about applying glazes - the middle ground hills are glazed in the shadow areas to slightly modify the shade, which was initially too dark. The trees also are mainly achieved with successive glazes until the correct colour and shade was achieved.

The foreground hills were mainly painted with mixes of Yellow Ochre, Burnt Umber and Titanium White. The background hill colours are mixed from French Ultramarine, Cadmium Yellow Light and Crimson. The sky is Phthalo blue tinted with Titanium White.