All Things Fine Art

"Dancing Daffs", 11x14, oil on panel, $500 unframed

“Dancing Daffs” was created as a demonstration painting in one of my recent workshops. The purpose of the demonstration was to show how I establish shape relationships from the beginning in my work to completion. Too often I see students focusing only on the form and placement of each shape as an independent entity, in this case each flower, with no consideration of the relationship between them. By doing so, their work is stagnate and often boring to the eye.

In “Dancing Daffs”, I established the movement in the painting during the block-in stage with line to suggest how I wanted the viewer’s eye to travel through the painting. Once I was satisfied that the line of movement worked the flowers were then loosely brushed in along the line in clusters of shapes that staggered with overlappage and spacing.   From this rough start, the painting was then brought forward slowly in layers from dark to light and from grayed tones to intense to define the ebb and flow of color. I painted back and forth between positive and negative shapes to define form as the forms developed.

I always prefer to work in these stages (or layers if you prefer) as it offers me an opportunity to keep things simple by focusing on single aspects of the painting at a time. This builds a sound substructure and I am able to see at any stage of the painting if it is working or not and to make corrections as needed before committing.