Dancers
ink wash on paper
Interview about my painting with Art Dog Blog
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How to Paint a Landscape in Oil
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On a Sailing Ship by Caspar David Friedrich
I would like to write about a painting that I have been contemplating, Caspar David Friedrich's On a Sailing Ship . A man and woman sit aboard a boat in a dark ocean headed toward land. The porcelain colored city in the distance is bathed in a soft light. It is close enough to be real to them, but distant enough for the atmosphere to make it dreamy and insubstantial. Look at how the man's jacket ripples as though he were a continuation of the sea. To his darkness (tonally and metaphorically), the woman is the light. He is one with the dark forbidding sea; she, her dress the color of clay, represents land and home and safety on a solid earth. She is perched up hopefully. The man, with slumped but straightening shoulders, looks up at land with similar longing, but as though as at a hope that is less real to him. This dynamic between the characters tells us that she is the greater moral strength between the two. The fact that she is in the light while the man
My mistake for not checking more often for new pieces! Something caught my eye about the dancers, and I couldn't figure out what it was until I stepped back about 15' from the computer and saw that the figures themselves are the source of illumination--unusual, and effective. The man is more detailed than the woman, although he's at more distance. Intentional? There's nice tension from the fact that each is moving in one direction but facing another. Thanks for sharing, JS
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