Day Eighty: Approaching Storm by George Inness
Hello and welcome to Day 80 of 100 days of Tonalism.
Today's study is of 'Approaching Storm' by George Inness.
We've got 20 more days to go and plenty more George Inness studies ahead of us. This one turned out to be pretty special for me you can read about that below at the end of this post. I have read a bit from the book 'George Inness' by Nicolai Cikovsky in today's video narration, so please check that out.
We've been discussing my progression as an artist to ultimately becoming a landscape painter in the last several blog posts. Today I'd like to talk about my earliest forays into oil painting. After my attempts at trying to create landscape paintings with a computer using Photoshop, I began to think seriously about using actual oil paints on canvas.
Prior to my career as a commercial illustrator I had mostly done color work with the computer, A lot of that art was of an abstract nature. For the most part, I had worked in pencil and in black and white before that. At various points I had worked with colored inks and watercolor but the only other oil painting I had done was when I was about 18 and an artist took interest in me and allowed me to join in with several of his painting classes. I wrote about this in my previous blog.
I ended up selling or giving away most of the oil paintings I did at that time. I believe I did about seven or eight landscape paintings in oils. I'd also did some more abstract landscapes in acrylic for my job at the hospitality art manufacturing company. Other than those occasion, I mostly worked in a small-scale with pencil and ink.
Once I decided to start doing actual oil paintings I reasoned that I would learn how to paint more quickly using small canvas panels. All of my first paintings were done this way. I went outdoors to do my first paintings. I quite enjoyed painting outdoors, however I was unhappy with the sorts of colors I was coming up with in response to painting directly from nature and I decided to work from my own photographs instead.
My first paintings were on canvas using 6x8 panels. The type of panels you can find it any art or hobby store. I enjoyed working with oil paint it's very flexible as a medium, especially after so many years of having to install almost every effect that I needed into my art using painstaking brushwork or stippling. One of the wonderful things about oil paint is the way that unexpected things can happen in small and large ways while you are painting.
Tomorrow we'll talk more about my personal journey as a landscape painter and its beginnings, so stay tuned for that.
Cheers,
M Francis McCarthy
Landscapepainter.co.nz
A bit about 'Approaching Storm' by George Inness; of all the studies in this series there are many ways in which the study has affected and influenced the way I am painting my own paintings currently.
If you watch the video you will observe a lot of my glazing and dry brush techniques which I'm using more these days to finish my paintings. I have been fortunate to see a few Inness paintings in real life and with this study I feel that I was actually getting very close to the sorts of textures and edges that I see in his work.
To see more of my work, visit my site here
 |
| Painted after - Approaching Storm by George Inness, Study by M Francis McCarthy - Size 5x7, Oil on wood panel |
Today's study is of 'Approaching Storm' by George Inness.
We've got 20 more days to go and plenty more George Inness studies ahead of us. This one turned out to be pretty special for me you can read about that below at the end of this post. I have read a bit from the book 'George Inness' by Nicolai Cikovsky in today's video narration, so please check that out.
We've been discussing my progression as an artist to ultimately becoming a landscape painter in the last several blog posts. Today I'd like to talk about my earliest forays into oil painting. After my attempts at trying to create landscape paintings with a computer using Photoshop, I began to think seriously about using actual oil paints on canvas.
Prior to my career as a commercial illustrator I had mostly done color work with the computer, A lot of that art was of an abstract nature. For the most part, I had worked in pencil and in black and white before that. At various points I had worked with colored inks and watercolor but the only other oil painting I had done was when I was about 18 and an artist took interest in me and allowed me to join in with several of his painting classes. I wrote about this in my previous blog.
I ended up selling or giving away most of the oil paintings I did at that time. I believe I did about seven or eight landscape paintings in oils. I'd also did some more abstract landscapes in acrylic for my job at the hospitality art manufacturing company. Other than those occasion, I mostly worked in a small-scale with pencil and ink.
Once I decided to start doing actual oil paintings I reasoned that I would learn how to paint more quickly using small canvas panels. All of my first paintings were done this way. I went outdoors to do my first paintings. I quite enjoyed painting outdoors, however I was unhappy with the sorts of colors I was coming up with in response to painting directly from nature and I decided to work from my own photographs instead.
My first paintings were on canvas using 6x8 panels. The type of panels you can find it any art or hobby store. I enjoyed working with oil paint it's very flexible as a medium, especially after so many years of having to install almost every effect that I needed into my art using painstaking brushwork or stippling. One of the wonderful things about oil paint is the way that unexpected things can happen in small and large ways while you are painting.
Tomorrow we'll talk more about my personal journey as a landscape painter and its beginnings, so stay tuned for that.
Cheers,
M Francis McCarthy
Landscapepainter.co.nz
A bit about 'Approaching Storm' by George Inness; of all the studies in this series there are many ways in which the study has affected and influenced the way I am painting my own paintings currently.
If you watch the video you will observe a lot of my glazing and dry brush techniques which I'm using more these days to finish my paintings. I have been fortunate to see a few Inness paintings in real life and with this study I feel that I was actually getting very close to the sorts of textures and edges that I see in his work.
To see more of my work, visit my site here
 |
| Original painting, Approaching Storm by George Inness |