Day Seventeen: Camille Corot Landscape
Hello and welcome to day 17 of 100 days of tonalism.
Painted after - Camille Corot Landscape Study by M Francis McCarthy - Size 5x7, Oil on wood panel
Today's study is of: Camille Corot 'Landscape.'
Today we are doing our first study of a painting by Camille Corot. I selected seven paintings by Camille for this project. Camille Corot a was very influential painter of the 19th century. He was also a huge influence on George Inness and for that reason a huge influence on tonalism in general.
You will notice below that I removed the figures from Camille's painting. At the time that Camille Corot was painting, pure landscape art was not in favor and was being only being executed by the Dutch painters. The tradition of pure landscape painting for the rest of the West, began with the Hudson River school in America and extended into tonalism. In France many Impressionist painters also eschewed figures in their landscape paintings.
I think this points to the fact that, as human beings we consider other human beings to be the central focus in our art. For that reason prior to the late 1800s figures are generally prominent in almost any painted scene. Even in the work of George Inness we see small figures in evidence.
Early on in my painting career I experimented with figures in my landscape paintings but I always felt very unsatisfied. It seems that any figure, human or animal becomes the focal point of the painting should they be present, regardless of how large or small they are the painting. If figures are present, this automatically creates narrative in that the viewer is presented with many questions about the figures there. Questions like: Who is that? Why are they there? Where are they going? Where were they before? Etc.
This is the nature of narratives, we create stories very easily when we see people present in art. There's nothing wrong with narrative in art if that is appropriate for what you are trying to do. In my case I prefer to create a scene that is empty except for a pervasive sense of emotion and poetry that invites the viewer in. In this way the viewer can occupy the painting fully without the impediment of narrative to cloud their minds.
Cheers,
M Francis McCarthy
A bit about 'Landscape' by Camille Corot: You can see from the video that this is one of the quicker paintings that I did in the series so far. This is because most of the tree is silhouetted against the bright sky and is quite dark, therefore lacking in a lot of objects to be rendered or details that need to be executed.
One of the main things I tried to accomplish with this study was to get the feeling of air into the trees. This is a hallmark of Camille Corot's style and something he did brilliantly. He did not execute his paintings quickly. Most of them he worked on for quite a while. You can see when you look at his actual paintings in real life that there are a lot of subtle modulations of values executed with a very small brush that give his work the shimmering silvery quality that he became so famous for.
The study is the shortcut approach I reckon. Basically I just used thin paint at the edges of the trees over my sienna ground to get an equivalent effect. All in all I am pretty happy with the results. I do feel that the figures that are present in the original were certainly central to the composition possibly because they were located in the center of the painting LOL!
Either way I learned a lot.
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