#7 Camille Corot 'The Pond' - 25 Days of Tonalism
Hello and welcome to Tonalist painting with M Francis McCarthy.
Today's painting is a study after Camille Corot 'The Pond'.
Our video features the progression of this study from its early underpainting stages on up through the final finishing brushwork. Also featured is my usual rambling narration, so please check it out.
While narrating today's video, I touched upon the concept of inspiration versus illustration. For those of you that do not know, I worked as a commercial illustrator for 13 years. I was employed full-time to create illustrations for all sorts of merchandise but mostly T-shirts. I consider this one of the best learning situations I've ever been in because I was forced to work quickly to produce excellent illustrations that had immediate impact and appealed to a retail market.
Inspiration versus illustration is a challenging topic to address, mostly because I am talking about subtle internal processes. This is something I think about quite often and I feel it's worthwhile to try and express the differences and distinctions that I see between illustration and fine art.
Creating an illustration is much like creating any other work of art, in that it requires intention, research and execution. The primary difference is that an illustration is created for a specific purpose like a design or to sell a product. While you can create exquisite and moving art as an illustrator that might qualify as fine art, the intention behind the creation of an illustration is usually commercially driven and this greatly affects the art created.
Underlying any work of art is intention. Intention is the force that drives the work through all of the myriad stages it goes through from conception to completion. Inspiration, is a byproduct of my intention to create a painting that is beautiful and emotionally cogent. For this reason, I do not always succeed as often at creating something great while pursuing fine art landscape painting as I did when I was a commercial illustrator.
You will often hear me talking on the videos about the relative success I had in the studio on that day or week. This is very different than my life in the studio as a commercial illustrator where I felt that I was always building on a previous success. Because I was solving commercial problems with limited schedules, I would use almost any sort of tool at my disposal to get the job done.
Another significant difference between illustration and fine art is that illustration greatly relies on style and technique to get across the meaning and significance of the artwork created. While this could also be true of fine art, I would argue that the fine artist style should ideally be created as a byproduct of the inspiration, driving the artwork rather than the other way around. We had a blog post about this topic recently and I conveyed some of my ideas about "style" there.
The one strong consistent aspect between being an illustrator and now working as a fine artist is that I have always strived to create the most excellent art that I was able to in the moment. As a fine artist though I will not cheat in any significant way. By cheating I mean copying the style or intent of another artist. There is no motive to do this because I am endeavoring to express what is individually unique about myself using oil paint and paint brushes and I have unlimited time to do that.
These are some of my thoughts on this topic. I may get into this again at a later date.
M Francis McCarthy
Landscapepainter.co.nz
A bit about my study of "The Pond" by Camille Corot; as I mentioned in the video, I have removed the figure from Camille's original design, also I have forced it into a square shape. For most of the square-shaped motifs in the 25 days of Tonalism project, this has been the case.
It's interesting how few artists have utilized the square format for landscape painting as opposed to the more traditional rectangle. In the case of this painting, it looks like Camille was working with a proportion of 3x4, so not too hard to add a little bit of sky at the top. I like the square format quite a lot and use it for about one-third of my paintings.
To see more of my work, visit my site here
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| Painted after - 'The Pond' by Camille Corot, Study by M Francis McCarthy - Size 5x5, Oil on wood panel |
Our video features the progression of this study from its early underpainting stages on up through the final finishing brushwork. Also featured is my usual rambling narration, so please check it out.
While narrating today's video, I touched upon the concept of inspiration versus illustration. For those of you that do not know, I worked as a commercial illustrator for 13 years. I was employed full-time to create illustrations for all sorts of merchandise but mostly T-shirts. I consider this one of the best learning situations I've ever been in because I was forced to work quickly to produce excellent illustrations that had immediate impact and appealed to a retail market.
Inspiration versus illustration is a challenging topic to address, mostly because I am talking about subtle internal processes. This is something I think about quite often and I feel it's worthwhile to try and express the differences and distinctions that I see between illustration and fine art.
Creating an illustration is much like creating any other work of art, in that it requires intention, research and execution. The primary difference is that an illustration is created for a specific purpose like a design or to sell a product. While you can create exquisite and moving art as an illustrator that might qualify as fine art, the intention behind the creation of an illustration is usually commercially driven and this greatly affects the art created.
Underlying any work of art is intention. Intention is the force that drives the work through all of the myriad stages it goes through from conception to completion. Inspiration, is a byproduct of my intention to create a painting that is beautiful and emotionally cogent. For this reason, I do not always succeed as often at creating something great while pursuing fine art landscape painting as I did when I was a commercial illustrator.
You will often hear me talking on the videos about the relative success I had in the studio on that day or week. This is very different than my life in the studio as a commercial illustrator where I felt that I was always building on a previous success. Because I was solving commercial problems with limited schedules, I would use almost any sort of tool at my disposal to get the job done.
Another significant difference between illustration and fine art is that illustration greatly relies on style and technique to get across the meaning and significance of the artwork created. While this could also be true of fine art, I would argue that the fine artist style should ideally be created as a byproduct of the inspiration, driving the artwork rather than the other way around. We had a blog post about this topic recently and I conveyed some of my ideas about "style" there.
The one strong consistent aspect between being an illustrator and now working as a fine artist is that I have always strived to create the most excellent art that I was able to in the moment. As a fine artist though I will not cheat in any significant way. By cheating I mean copying the style or intent of another artist. There is no motive to do this because I am endeavoring to express what is individually unique about myself using oil paint and paint brushes and I have unlimited time to do that.
These are some of my thoughts on this topic. I may get into this again at a later date.
M Francis McCarthy
Landscapepainter.co.nz
A bit about my study of "The Pond" by Camille Corot; as I mentioned in the video, I have removed the figure from Camille's original design, also I have forced it into a square shape. For most of the square-shaped motifs in the 25 days of Tonalism project, this has been the case.
It's interesting how few artists have utilized the square format for landscape painting as opposed to the more traditional rectangle. In the case of this painting, it looks like Camille was working with a proportion of 3x4, so not too hard to add a little bit of sky at the top. I like the square format quite a lot and use it for about one-third of my paintings.
To see more of my work, visit my site here
 |
| Original painting, Camille Corot 'The Pond' |
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| Painted after - 'The Pond' by Camille Corot (Detail 1) |
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| Painted after - 'The Pond' by Camille Corot (Detail 2) |