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Unread 01-21-2015, 10:20 AM
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Rick Mullin Rick Mullin is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: Northern New Jersey
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Thanks Woody and Michael,

Woody, van Gogh is probably my primary influence as a painter. He is known for his color, but I think of him as a draftsman. My painting has a lot of drawing in it.

Michael, I'm glad the trees are working that way. They are kind of handlike, pushing aside the curtains of the clouds... or maybe I'm reading too much into it.

Actually, one can correct a painting. I've done it with paint and I've done it with scissors. Pentimenti is a fascination of mine. I find your thoughts on the foreground interesting. I wonder if they would have occurred to you if your first impression included the whole painting. I like it as is because it places the viewer specifically at street level, across the river, thus giving a downward perspective on the two walking figures. It also establishes a corollary to the wall above the river on the other side. Note that the trees are rooted at the river walk level--the band representing the sidewalk wall at street level cuts across them.

The other thing is that, as I have it, the eye pulls up to look at the field you first saw. This is an important effect that would be lost if your eyes just arrive at l'Institute. There is no detail whatsoever in the first band. Very little in the second other than the human element, which is the anchor. Despite being, I think, the most intriguing detail, if only because of its human elementness, it remains in the part that your eye is drawn up from. It's discovered later. I wouldn't want to lose this by trimming up to the river. I grant you, however, that the trees are truly eerie without the notation of the shore in the foreground.

This one brought me to the kind of despair that makes one walk in the middle of the day to the The Irish Punt and write things in a notebook along the lines of "why do I do this to myself". I also promised myself that I will only work small from here on out. But I snapped out of all that.

Thanks again,
RM

NB: This is all brush work. No palette knife, though I sometimes paint with a knife. The palette knife paintings are no more thickly painted than the brush paintings, but they have flatter, more fractaled surfaces. And it is a lot easier to clean up when you're finished when you paint with a knife.

Last edited by Rick Mullin; 01-21-2015 at 10:42 AM.
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