Day Twenty: Landscape by Charles Appel
Hello and welcome to day 20 of 100 days of Tonalism.
Painted after - Landscape by Charles Appel, Study by M Francis McCarthy - Size 5x7, Oil on wood panel
Today's study is of: 'Landscape' by Charles Appel.
Charles Appel,a very mysterious guy. No doubt he was not terribly mysterious when he was alive but while researching him online this evening it became quite apparent that however popular he was when he was alive, he was definitely more popular than he is now. After some rigorous searching I was able to find some very basic biographical information about him. He was born in 1854 and died in 1928. I've read the short biography I found about him in the videos narration, so check that out if you want to learn more.
The defining characteristic of Charles seems to be his very colorful twilight skies. I quite like his work and if I should do a second series of studies, I will be sure to include some more of his work.
I was listening to a podcast today wherein the interviewee of the program was discussing how art history likes to skip from Impressionism to Surrealism which is about a 30 year jump in time. Its an unfortunate coincidence that tonalism occupies this supposedly uninteresting time in art history. This would be the time from the Civil War until just after World War I, Certainly a time of incredible changes in the way people lived, worked, created and interacted with art.
Continuing on with our conversation about the defining characteristics of tonalist paintings, I'd like to discuss the concept of unity today. We discussed this a bit in the video narration for
which featured a study after a George Inness painting. However, most of that narration was from a quote by George Inness, I thought it would be good to write about unity in an actual blog post too.
Unity is achieved in a landscape painting by avoiding expansive vistas and/or convoluted compositional motifs. The reason for this is that a scene that needs to be scanned to be perceived, is interacted with visually by the viewer in a very similar manner to the way we perceive nature itself. In other words the scene is scanned point by point and an image is then created in the mind of the viewer. The ideal would be for the scene to be perceived by the viewer all in one go with no scanning required.
I won't repeat the quote by George Inness here verbatim, but basically it goes something like this: "cut a hole in a piece of paper about 3x6" and place that piece of paper 10 inches away from your face, everything that can be seen through that hole can be perceived by the human eye in one scan". You wouldn't have to move your eyes or your head to take in a scene like this. For this reason a scene of this type would be compositionally more restful than something that is much broader in scope.
This is a very simple and yet subtle idea. Subtle in that it's easy to miss this sort of idea especially when working with photographic reference while painting. It's too easy to believe that just because the scene is encapsulated within a rectangle that the scene can be portrayed with visual unity. Unity is something that needs to be installed into your picture and I feel it's very worthwhile to do so.
Cheers,
M Francis McCarthy
A bit about Landscape' by Charles Appel. This was a fun study to do and I am happy with the final study. I enjoyed painting the colorful sky. I worked very quickly and most of the application of paint here is done quite thinly as well.
There is an interesting contrast in this study between the intense chroma of the sky opposing the desaturated colors of the landscape itself. I embraced the absence of detail as evidenced in the original. I believe that Charles Appel abandoned detail in favor of enhancing the emotional content.
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Original painting, Landscape by Charles Appel