Evening River 12x12
Hello and welcome to Tonalist paintings by M Francis McCarthy.
Today's painting is 'Evening River' 12x12".
Today's video shows you the progression of this painting. The video is sped up about 15 times faster than I actually painted. The video narration features my usual rambling on an assortment of issues that pertain to my painting process and life in general, so please check it out.
I've been recently addressing the challenge of scaling up my work to larger sizes by using larger brushes.
When I first started oil painting I was using what I thought were large brushes but I was also using various small pointed sable type brushes. With these brushes I was making a lot of tiny stipple like strokes. If you look at some of my earliest work you see that some of it is actually very detailed. This is a holdover from my many years as an illustrator. Not to say that the pursuit of excessive detail is a good thing (even for illustrators) but it was something that I was interested in for a part of my life and career as an artist.
As I progressed with my work, I became increasingly aware of how excessive detail was hurting my painting. Ultimately, it is best to express yourself in oils with a broader more gestural approach that is more expressive of emotion and subsumes detail to the larger shapes and forms of the landscape. This puts the emphasis on values and color and leaves the simulation and scanning of detail to the imagination of the paintings viewer. I've been working with this aspect of painting quite a lot, especially as I become more experienced, and developed as a landscape painter.
As I discussed on the video I've been experiencing an interesting phenomenon in regard to the size of brush that I'm painting with. I often feel that I'm using a large brush while doing the painting, but after looking at the videos of my painting process, I'm often struck that I should have used a much larger brush than I chose.
What's interesting about this is that I've sort of noticed it for a year now and I did not actually jump up to a significantly larger brush. One of the reasons for this issue coming to a head, is that I am doing progressively larger work now than I was in 2014.
In late 2013, I decided that I was going to paint only 8x8 and 8x10 paintings. For this reason, it's taken me jumping up to larger panel sizes to finally begin seeing the need for the use of larger brushes. What I've been doing with this last group of paintings that I've been working on, is using a number four where I would have used a number two brush, a number six where I would have used a number four brush, a number eight where I would have used a number six and, mostly importantly and significantly, I am using a number ten where previously the largest brush I ever used was a number eight.
You can see have moved up in size overall and the results I'm getting are far more satisfying. I'm excited about my progress since making this change so I thought it would be cool to share that with you. It'll be a couple of months before I have actually composited videos of some of the paintings I've been doing this month because of the way I work in an extended arc of 14 to 18 motifs in a given painting cycle.
Cheers,
M Francis McCarthy
Landscapepainter.co.nz
A bit about Evening River 12x12"; I'm very happy with this painting and it was a bit touch and go for a while there but ultimately I succeeded in creating the type of painting that I'm interested in doing at this point in my career.
I like the simplified forms and moody quality of this painting and also I'm pleased with the interlaced textural quality of the brushwork. This painting strikes a good balance, between freshness and finish.
To see more of my work, visit my site here
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| Evening River 12x12 by M Francis McCarthy, 12x12" Oil Painting on Wood Panel |
Today's video shows you the progression of this painting. The video is sped up about 15 times faster than I actually painted. The video narration features my usual rambling on an assortment of issues that pertain to my painting process and life in general, so please check it out.
I've been recently addressing the challenge of scaling up my work to larger sizes by using larger brushes.
When I first started oil painting I was using what I thought were large brushes but I was also using various small pointed sable type brushes. With these brushes I was making a lot of tiny stipple like strokes. If you look at some of my earliest work you see that some of it is actually very detailed. This is a holdover from my many years as an illustrator. Not to say that the pursuit of excessive detail is a good thing (even for illustrators) but it was something that I was interested in for a part of my life and career as an artist.
As I progressed with my work, I became increasingly aware of how excessive detail was hurting my painting. Ultimately, it is best to express yourself in oils with a broader more gestural approach that is more expressive of emotion and subsumes detail to the larger shapes and forms of the landscape. This puts the emphasis on values and color and leaves the simulation and scanning of detail to the imagination of the paintings viewer. I've been working with this aspect of painting quite a lot, especially as I become more experienced, and developed as a landscape painter.
As I discussed on the video I've been experiencing an interesting phenomenon in regard to the size of brush that I'm painting with. I often feel that I'm using a large brush while doing the painting, but after looking at the videos of my painting process, I'm often struck that I should have used a much larger brush than I chose.
What's interesting about this is that I've sort of noticed it for a year now and I did not actually jump up to a significantly larger brush. One of the reasons for this issue coming to a head, is that I am doing progressively larger work now than I was in 2014.
In late 2013, I decided that I was going to paint only 8x8 and 8x10 paintings. For this reason, it's taken me jumping up to larger panel sizes to finally begin seeing the need for the use of larger brushes. What I've been doing with this last group of paintings that I've been working on, is using a number four where I would have used a number two brush, a number six where I would have used a number four brush, a number eight where I would have used a number six and, mostly importantly and significantly, I am using a number ten where previously the largest brush I ever used was a number eight.
You can see have moved up in size overall and the results I'm getting are far more satisfying. I'm excited about my progress since making this change so I thought it would be cool to share that with you. It'll be a couple of months before I have actually composited videos of some of the paintings I've been doing this month because of the way I work in an extended arc of 14 to 18 motifs in a given painting cycle.
Cheers,
M Francis McCarthy
Landscapepainter.co.nz
A bit about Evening River 12x12"; I'm very happy with this painting and it was a bit touch and go for a while there but ultimately I succeeded in creating the type of painting that I'm interested in doing at this point in my career.
I like the simplified forms and moody quality of this painting and also I'm pleased with the interlaced textural quality of the brushwork. This painting strikes a good balance, between freshness and finish.
To see more of my work, visit my site here
 |
| Evening River 12x12 (Detail) |