jan 19 Storm and Fire

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How to Paint a Landscape in Oil

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This is a landscape painted with oil on paper. It was painted from a photograph and the subject is a pond in Central Park. The visual theme is "distance" and all of my choices were made in order to communicate and stress the illusion of space.  The painting was made in four layers, with a few days between each one to allow the paint to dry. I am going to describe the process of each layer. STEP 1 The first step is to block in the large shapes. This is a means of mapping out the composition, choosing which objects will be included and which omitted. The exact tones used at this stage are not absolutely critical but are an approximation of the target colors. Since they will serve as a substrate for subsequent layers, I mixed them lighter and duller than my target colors. That way they won't dominate subsequent layers by showing through and altering the color of those layers—at least no more than I want them to. STEP 2 The next layer of paint is
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On a Sailing Ship by Caspar David Friedrich

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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
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