Day Eleven: Clearing after a Storm by Charles Harold Davis
Hello and welcome to day eleven of 100 days of tonalism.
Painted after - Clearing after a Storm by Charles Harold Davis , Study by M Francis McCarthy - Size 5x7, Oil on wood panel
Today's study is of 'Clearing after a Storm' by Charles Harold Davis .
Not your typical M Francis painting and that's one of the reason I did it. Charles Harold Davis had Tonalist tendencies but also worked in an Impressionist vein, yet with strong leanings towards a Barbizon approach. In other words he is a total hybrid and, in the case of Charles very successfully so. Here's link to a great page on Charles.
I was thinking today about what it means to be a contemporary landscape painter who is very influenced by the Landscape painting movements of the late Nineteenth century. It's not an easy stance to take. Doing the painting is the easiest part. It means answering a lot of questions I would not be asked if I painted in the current mode. Questions like: Why are you painting like this? Why are these painting so full of mood? What the heck is Tonalism?
As to the question of why paint this way?
The short answer is that it feels right to me. It feels authentic. The long answer or a portion of it is: art (in the form of painting here) is often regarded as evolving by art writers, and thus the general public. This same idea is often applied to music as well.
The truth is, this idea of evolution is only somewhat correct. While one can observe a progression in art through the ages of advances like, correct perspective and anatomy, after a certain level of perfection is reached, art is laid bare. At that point, great art comes from the soul and there is no evolution, just expression. I plan on discussing this idea further as this blog progresses. It occurred to me today, that this is as good a soapbox as any to express my opinions and ideas about painting and art in general.
Cheers,
M Francis McCarthy
A bit about 'Clearing after a Storm' by Charles Harold Davis. This one was fun and I knew it would be. I was attracted to the warm brown land and how it was so well offset by the big blue sky.
As I mentioned in the video, I made the barn in the original into a clump of trees. Sorry, not into painting barns and as I've stated before the point of these studies is to capture the essence of each original scene as I see it and to interpret that painting as a small study in my way of painting.
I see little point in making exact copies of any painting unless it's for purely educational purposes. In fact, there are dozens of sites happy to make you a copy of any painting in any size you like for a fairly reasonable amount of dosh. The reason these services can charge so little is that they employ legions of artists in China well trained in making these reproductions.
I wish I could set free these artists so that each of them could make their own unique art and present it to the world. I believe that in the future, much of humanity will be artists as the robots will have taken every other job. In fact I consider myself at the front of this future wave and I look forward to the day when all humanity is free to express their inner selves openly and at leisure!
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